THE GOTAN PROJECT

Dance music is a strange, mongrel beast. It'll feed off anything: we've all shimmied to salsa house, and Brazilian samples have excited clubbers around the world. There's been indie dance, dub disco and Afrobeat. And now there’s tango. With the success of their release La Revancha Del Tango (sales currently in excess of 400, 000 copies worldwide) French dance producers turned world music crusaders, the Paris-based collective Gotan Project have infected the record boxes of DJs around the world. Left-looking spinners including Gilles Peterson, Thievery Corporation, Peter Kruder, UFO, Jazzanova, Rainer Trьby, Herbert and Mr Scruff have all been championing their continent-crossing fusion of tango, dub and beats since their debut single 'El Capitalismo Foraneo' appeared in January 2000.

In its native Argentina the tango is the music of revolution, both sexual and political. It's Argentina's pop, jazz and its folk music all rolled into one. It's music that came from the barrios and swept the high societies of Europe in the early 20th Century. The second tango invasion came much later: in the late1970’s, when the country's right wing military junta forced many left wing musicians to flee and find refuge in more liberal cities; like Paris. "There has always been a big tango scene in Paris", says Gotan founder Philippe Cohen Solal. Indeed the word Gotan itself is just "tango" said in Buenos Aires' Verlan slang - the Argentinean underworld's equivalent of old fashioned London argot like backslang or Polari. "In Verlan they use the word Gotan to mean tango", explains Phillippe, "there was a tango club in Paris called Gotan in the 60’s."

Employing some of the finest tango musicians in Europe, Phillippe and fellow Gotan Projectors Christophe and Eduardo allowed them to freestyle around a theme - then returned to the studio to edit the jams into a seductive tango dub. "We are not scared of treating or filtering the musicians," they say. " We're "using" electronic tricks to make the tango more accessible and that's why it works. We don't want to do deep house, with long solos on top of that - its really boring. The improvisation has to come back to real melodies and bring melodies back into dance music. We love dub, we love soundtrack music, and we wanted to discover something surprising that nobody would expect." With cover versions of the theme from "Last Tango In Paris"‚ and a dubbed-out take on Frank Zappa's 'Chunga's Revenge', this is willfully weird but strangely compelling music that ignores both geographical and musical borders.

Philippe has spent the last 10 years working as a musical supervisor, collaborating with film directors like Lars Von Trier (on Europa), Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Nikita Yolande Zauberman (Clubbed to Death), before hooking up with mutual mate Christophe Mueller and veteran Argentinean йmigrй and musician Eduardo Makaroff. A veteran guitarist and singer,who's already recorded 12 albums, written and played on film soundtracks and presented TV shows in his native Buenos Aries, Eduardo Makaroff came to Paris in 1990, where he's fronted the tango group Tango Mano and conducted the orchestra for Paris tango club Dancing de la Coupole.

"We wanted to work together for a long time", explains Philippe, "and then Eduardo made me discover the really percussive, groovy side of Argentinean music. We wanted to do something we really loved, with no compromise or thinking about selling to others". Only problem is, they may have been very wrong about the last part. With the XL recordings licensing of El Revancha Del Tango in the UK and its simultaneous release in the rest of Europe on the group’s own ЎYa Basta! Records, sales have soared worldwide. With the U.S release of La Revancha Del Tango around the corner, Gotan Project‘s spin on tango is propelling well into the mainstream and beyond.