by
Paranoid for Relevant BCN
Welcome to Relevant BCN - rbcn - Be Creative Now! Cita:
People often make mistakes when reffering to the places they go out to dance as nightclubs. Starting from the word itself, the ´club´ part is almost completely lost nowadays in most of the succesfull venues around the world and there are only a few places you always hear stories about that actually have that club feeling. The rest of them just wouldn't fit as a club due to several factors which also affect other places where people get together to do anything, or to be more direct, several factors that affect society as a society.
What is, or used to be called a club is a place where people get together, share common interests and generate relationships between each other creating fruitful and constructive situations, focused all together in each one just for his/her essence, leaving to one side all those things that may stop this from happening like religion, politics, sex orientation, origen, even the language they speak sometimes.
Here's when what I'm trying to say takes shape, when the language you speak doesn't matter because music is the language, and dancing is the conversation. That's what clubbing is, or used to be called. That's what's getting lost. That's what you hear happens sometimes at some special places, or what used to happen at a special time, like the rave movement in the 90's, for example.
Nowadays we still have some of those places where the only thing that matters is the music and the party itself, in Europe there are a few that are well known for this, all of them related in a way or another with the underground, there is where this roots are still pushing out and are always present on those dancefloors. And since we are loosing these places, I think it's vital for us to know some place where it all still exists.
Looking across the Atlantic. South America is really at a disadvantage compared with Europe, but at least in Buenos Aires there is still a place where you can find it, where a bunch of people stand aware of all this lost clubbing situation, and while thinking about a solution, started a place that brought life back the clubbing vibe: Cocoliche.
Many stories have been heard about Coco, and for this reason there are many mainstream acclaimed electronic artists from all around the world are going there just to have fun while touring South America.
Udolph, one of Cocos creators, a techno-Dj-Old-School-Lover based in Buenos Aires that really has some great stories to tell, and that's the juice I was looking for in this interview, the refreshing one. Enjoy.
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Hello Udolph, let’ start with your point of view regarding the Argentinean electronic scene over the last years, would you consider it a growing scene?
Hola! It depends on how you look at the scene. If you are owner of a big club or a mainstream festival brand, you might think the scene is decreasing, getting smaller and becoming bad business because the big boom of electronic music here is a past thing. But this is also happening because those responsible for the mainstream scene have been offering the same bullshit for the last 10 years, and they were not able to establish a TRUE SCENE, they created a shonky monster addicted to their commercial events and they don’t really care about people, or music, only thing they care about is selling tickets, and people are sick of this.
Of course there’s still a lot of people that keeps attending these festivals and clubs, but you can notice the decreasing interest due to a lack of options, and quality. I think this also happens because there’s not even one person who has an active role in the scene involved; it’s all managed by businessman that don’t like to party, they don’t respect artists as artists, they feel no love for anything else but money, for them it’s just business.
What I see is that we have reached a moment where people are demanding a change in the scene, they want big festivals and big parties, but new ones, with updated lin-ups including local artists, giving them the place they deserve. The scene is demanding good quality, and I think this shows a great evolution. A few years ago it could have been impossible to have an artist like Chris Liebing or Apparat at a mainstream club like Crobar, but we did it, and the response was great. We had sold out nights at one of the snooty mainstream clubs in Buenos Aires.
Also, in the last 4 years many Argentine producers made the electronic world look over here, some of them have become a reference to their sound and their tracks are being played all over the world by many great dj’s, and this also shows that the scene is growing.
But we have a problem, as Argentina is a corrupted country, and mafia grows everywhere, it’s very hard to open new clubs, get permits for festivals or even get support for cultural events, so this is our main struggle.
We need more spaces, we need sponsors, we need permits, and all this is sadly managed by the people that handle big amounts of money, and they want to keep on doing it.
Beside all this, we get no support from the government, here electronic music equals death, destruction, drugs, evil, etc. There’s some kind of witch hunt after the scene that you won’t see in the rock scene or the pop scene or tango scene, it seems that the only people using drugs are electronic music listeners, and we are driving the world towards destruction!!!
Anyway, I’m 100% sure that our time to enjoy what we love is really close, and this is because we have this unexplainable passion for music and everything involved that we will overcome any obstacle, beside this they will get old and tired sooner than us!
As a Dj you travelled through Latin America, what impression did you have in those countries?
I’ve only been in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay, I’m still missing some special places, I’d really like to go and play in places like Ecuador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico or Paraguay but Latin America is a warm continent where each country is different, even cities from the same country are very different, but everywhere you go, Latin Americans like to party a lot, everybody is very social and are great hosts.
My impression is that there’s a lot of work to do, it's still a young scene, but anyway I must tell you I’ve been surprised more than once with amazing parties in amazing places.
It seems that Cocoliche is kind of an exception and can't be compared to any other place in the region, how would you explain this phenomenon?
1) It’s a small club.
2) Owned by Dj’s.
3) Placed in a very nice 1920's building.
4) Good programming.
5) Devoted crowd.
6) Great soundsystem
7) Super freak crew (barmans/doorman/security/cleaning)
8) We care (about people)
9) We don’t care (about police)
10) We love to party
What do you see are the trendy sounds nowadays in the places that you move?
I can feel music is getting more real, I’m listening each time more and more tracks that are not compromised with regular dancefloors, tracks that are not trying to cover people expectations, tracks that are a real transmission of what the artist was trying to express.I can feel my sets are getting darker, more distorted and intense. (Maybe it’s just winter and not a trend)
Why not to escape to the summer again? Are you considering a new tour around Europe?
Yes, in winter I might go, but not now, I’m focused on my first live set, besides our winter is very busy here, and if I go to Europe now, during summer, I might get lost.
Is it true that we are always one step behind Europe regarding genres or sounds in the clubbing scene?
There are a just few clubs/parties all over South America with similar line ups as in Europe, USA or Asia, the rest is 2 to 3 years behind.
What were the hardest things to overcome as an up and coming artist?
The question sounds tragic, I don’t think there was a hard thing to overcome, but I can tell you this: everything would have been much easier with money.
And to create your own club?
It was really hard to find the venue , we spent almost 3 years looking for one until we found it, it was love at first sight, this was in 2004, before all club and events permits regulation changed due to a tragic fire at a ROCK N ROLL concert at a shitty illegal venue where a lot of kids died. When this happened all clubs where forced to shut down, and all permits were taken away, Argentina had no club scene for almost 40 days, and Buenos Aires for almost 3 months, they changed the regulation, they killed the underground scene, and it took us 18 months to open again. It was a never ending nightmare for us at Cocoliche, and this year and a half was one the hardest thing to overcome.
Link to the complete interview: Udolph interview - rbcn - Be Creative Now!
Cocoliche Dreaming - Udolph (Cocoliche - Malevo) interview on RBCN 
