El Último Grito: Pena, Duende, and Nostalgia in the Information Age

El Último Grito is an avant-garde indie electronic neoflamenco band based out of Paris. I shall consider the rapid evolution of indie economics due to recent technological innovations which have effectively removed the barriers to entry for aspiring indie musicians and critics alike. I argue that the invention of the internet has induced rampant inflationary pressure on indie cultural capital, homogenized the international indie musical palette, fueled widespread conspicuous cultural consumption, and affected a global subcultural stillbirth. Throughout the study I will analyze El Último Grito ́s music, lyrics, and interview responses to illuminate their variety of stances: indie, flamenco, Spaniard, exorcist, expat, cultural critic, performance artist, and avant-garde indie electronic neoflamenco. El Último Grito laments a technological dystopia while performing a style of music which, in its very essence, is iconic of technological advance: indie experimental electronica. Live, El Último Grito invokes the duende spirit, exhorting reconnection with the emotional extremities many of us lost in the digital age: joy and sorrow, love and hate, fear and peace. Lyrically, they remind their Spanish audience to be aware of the penas of yore and to beware the penas to come. Musically, El Último Grito takes an unorthodox approach to preserving the purity of flamenco expression, as well as a completely unmarketable approach toward achieving global indie success. In so doing, they capture the original essence and authenticity of both musical genres. MLA Citation: Arnold, Michael. “El Último Grito: Pena, Duende, and Nostalgia in the Information Age.” Nomenclatura: aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos 3 (2014): 37-50. Web. Available at: http://uknowledge.uky.edu/naeh/vol3/iss1/6 Nomenclatura: aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos is an annual online academic journal dedicated to interdisciplinary scholarship on the literary and cultural traditions of the Hispanic world. The journal is a graduate-student production of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky and publishes original research in both English and Spanish on diverse aspects of the Hispanic world, ranging from the medieval period to the present. Nomenclatura: Aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos Volume 3, 2014 Arnold 37 l Último Grito is an avant-garde, experimental, indie electronic neoflamenco band based out of Paris. The group was formed by two Spanish ex-pat musicians, Julián Demoraga (vocals) and Diego “El Kinki” (programming and vocals). Demoraga and El Último Grito help to explain how contemporary technological revolutions have affected the way the Spanish imagined community envisions itself within European and global spheres. Specifically, Demoraga mourns the death of the duende for the modern-day Spaniard. Is the mystical duende now truly absent? The technological dystopia which Demoraga and El Último Grito lament is, paradoxically, expressed through a musical technique which in its very essence is iconic of technological advance: indie experimental electronica. In this article, I consider how Demoraga’s sentiment echoes those of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca and gothic post-punk troubadour Nick Cave. Both Demoraga and Cave seem to draw on an overtly regressive, anti-modern, anti-rational nostalgia. This kind of nostalgia is usually connected with totalitarian politics, but the causes and consequences of these poets’ nostalgia are quite distinct. Demoraga is troubled by the absence of the duende and penas in contemporary rock and pop music. Preoccupied with what he perceives as an increasingly isolated Spanish society, he is nostalgic for the aesthetic and political potential of such expression: the duende as unifier, the quejío as catharsis. Julián Demoraga moved from Madrid to Paris in 1982 in order to finish his studies of art history and restoration. In Paris, about a decade later, Demoraga began to first discover an affinity for electronic music. A little more than a decade after his first introduction to electronic sounds, Demoraga would meet his current collaborator, Diego “El Kinki,” while the latter was performing with his electronic group Le Dernier Cri. Following some impromptu live collaboration between Diego and Julián, El Último Grito was born. The band’s first release, Una hora (2009) was based on this improvisational spirit, the cathartic release of a momentary rush of duende: “Para nuestro primer disco ‘una hora,’ la inspiración fue firme e inmediata: lo sentí, ¡lo hice! No hubo premeditación alguna” (“For our first album, ‘una hora,’ the inspiration was unwavering and immediate: I felt it, I did it! There wasn’t a moment of premeditation; Demoraga, “Re: ÚLTIMO”). Diego and Julián each contribute a foundation for their improvisations. Diego at times provides a beat and structure for a song based on a variety of palos: bulerías, tangos, soleares, debla, taranta, petenera, tientos, seguirillas, copla, etc., to which Julián will contribute text and melody. Alternatively, Demoraga will create a lyrical structure based on his poetry to which Diego composes a variety of beats. Whatever the case, the song is always initially performed without practice before an audience which functions to heighten sensitivity and awareness for both contributors. For Una hora, the pair desired to create a radicalized concept of improvisational neoflamenco by excluding the most essential element of flamenco music, the guitar. The rhythmic component of the flamenco guitar was replaced by palmas, while the guitar’s melodic elements were performed by a handful of Parisian musicians playing a variety of wind and brass instruments: the saxophone, the flute, the clarinet, the clarion, etc. The band only decided to finally incorporate the flamenco guitar after meeting Stéphan Péron, a French student of said instrument who joined the band in 2007. Julián and Diego decided they could integrate Perón’s guitar work into their sound while maintaining an Arnold 38 “At the Crossroads of Literature and Technology” air of avant-garde duende by making him adapt his traditional flamenco guitar technique education to their very non-traditional, chaotic live improvisational performances. El Último Grito derives a hybrid combination style from eclectic musical and cultural influences that comes off live as at times kitschy, at times chaotic, at times cacophonous, and at times truly jondo. The avant-garde indie electronic neoflamenco band has discovered a niche of like-minded French and Spanish expat followers in Paris. Nevertheless, El Último Grito’s wild take on flamenco music can often be a difficult sell in France: “En España, la música electrónica está en todas partes (bares, salas, verbenas, tele). Es un fondo cultural común. En Francia, la gente no tiene las mismas referencias musicales. Y el público sensible al flamenco y muchos aficionados suelen más escuchar un flamenco tradicional, ‘puro’. Tienen una idea del flamenco, el mito del ‘puro’” (“In Spain, electronic music is everywhere (in the bars, clubs, festivals, tely.) It is a shared cultural foundation. In France, people don’t have the same musical references. Also, the French audience that appreciates flamenco, and the many French flamenco aficionados typically listen to traditional, ‘pure’ flamenco. They have an idea about flamenco, the myth of ‘purity’;” García Ramos). The primary reference point for most fans of indie electronic and flamenco music is the much more subdued band Chambao. The lack of trance and pounding rhythms in Chambao’s slow tempo compositions led the band and producer Henrik Takkenberg to coin a new subgenre for their electronic flamenco music which they refer to as flamenco chill. Demoraga and Diego say that the only perceivable flamenco influence in Chambao comes through the vocal expression. El Último Grito’s members believe electronic flamenco should be richer, especially with respect to the traditional flamenco palo rhythms: “Chambao es ritmo de house, pero no van entrando en los ritmos bulerías . . . no van entrando en estas cosas. Hacen música más mainstream, salen los mismos ritmos habituales” (“Chambao uses a house rhythm, but they never experiment with bulerías rhythms . . . they don’t involve themselves with these issues. They make mainstream music which employs the same old rhythms”; Diego “El Kinki”). El Último Grito, by comparison, begins the composition of every song structure based on a specific palo before putting flesh to the rhythmic skeleton: “Julián canta una letra flamenca, por bulerías, o por petenera, o por caña, o una debla, o una cosa así . . . Entonces la estructura ya es flamenca” (“Julián sings a flamenco lyric por bulerías, or por petenera, or por caña, or a debla, or something like that . . . So the structure is already flamenco”; Diego “El Kinki”). This tension between how flamenco authenticity is preserved (in this case the voice vs. the palo) by recent hybrid innovators is consistent with the entire history of flamenco. The struggle over who can perform authentic flamenco (i.e. gypsies vs. payos, professionals vs. amateurs, etc.) and how (i.e. operatic vocals vs. voz afillá, authentic palos and instrumentation, etc.) dates back to the mid-1800s. The voz afillá, for instance, is a mode of flamenco singing first employed by one of the earliest known flamenco performers, El Fillo (18201878). His hoarse voice delivered low, worn, and course tones which is still today considered by many flamenco aficionados to be quintessentially jondo. The authenticity of El Fillo’s vocal delivery, however, was questioned by the very first famous flamenco singer, El Planeta (1770-1850). El Planeta, who had chosen El Fillo to be his disciple, admonished him regarding his singing voice: “Te digo, El Fillo, que esa voz . . . es crúa y no de recibo; Nomenclatura: Aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos Volume 3, 2014 Arnold 39 y en cuanto al estilo, ni es fino, ni de la tierra. Así, te pido por favor . . . que no camines por sus aguas, y te atengas a la pauta antigua, y no salgas un sacramento del camino trillado” (“I’m telling you, El Fillo, that this voice . . . is unrefined and unacceptable; and with respect to style, it is neither smooth nor local. So I plead you . . . not to follow this route, but rather that you follow the longestablished pattern, and that you do not stray one step from the beaten path”; Gamboa y Nuñez 602). Battles over authentic flamenco expression predate Antonio Mairena’s cante jondo revival, Lorca and Manuel de Falla’s 1922 Concurso y Fiesta del Cante Jondo, the invention of the phonograph, and most likely the café cantante. El Último Grito’s live performances are an experimental electronic take on a bygone era of raw, immediate, flamenco expression. Demoraga, while performing live, schizophrenically slips in and out of several of his influences. As if in a trance (which is a condition linked to authentic music production and appreciation for flamenco and electronic fans alike), Demoraga screeches like Bambino, then warbles like Marchena, before succumbing to a psychedelic freakout à la Triana. It is messy on every level. The live show is primarily composed of one or more of the following elements: howling, melodic, or stuttered vocals which fluctuate between the operatic and the voz afillá; a cacophonous mélange of horns and strings; and samplers/synthesizers approximating a number of palos. El Último Grito’s recorded music mirrors the chaotic hybrid genre-bending of their indie neoflamenco colleagues in Spain. And yet their live performances further push this conceptual bedlam by adding another layer of temporal hybridity. The live spectacle is constantly fluctuating between the retro and the futuristic, at times intermingling both at once. The warmth of the traditional call-andresponse flamenco framework between the guitar and vocals is replaced here by the cold beat manipulation of Diego’s machines. The rigidity of Diego’s Ableton Live pre-programmed beat samples seems a technological innovation antithetical to the very foundations of flamenco tradition. Yet the futuristic pulse of the machine is always conquered, bent, distorted, and rearticulated by Diego’s manipulations. Whereas Demoraga’s vocal and physical performance fluctuates between Bambino and Iggy Pop, his lyrical compositions oscillate between Federico García Lorca and Leonard Cohen. Demoraga seamlessly blends the shared concerns of twenty-first-century Europeans with those explored throughout traditional flamenco lyricism: loneliness, love, nostalgia, heartbreak, loss, and the fleeting, futile existence of mankind. Despite the limitations of the machine, Diego and Julián complement each other when performing live according to an open-form flamenco framework: songs are not entirely fixed nor entirely improvised, but rather are based on a pre-established structure in which a series of mutually shared codes allow Diego to rapidly adjust to Julián’s interpretation, which is improvised according to the moment. “Es un poquito como el flamenco . . . todo el mundo sabe cómo va a ser la letra pero no sabe nada de lo que va a cantar en este momento” (“It ́s kind of like flamenco . . . everybody knows the lyrics, but nobody knows what will actually be sung in the moment”; Diego “El Kinki”). For El Último Grito, pure representation of the instinctive flamenco spirit trumps finesse: “la sofisticación no es una preocupación primordial” (“sophistication is not a primordial concern”; Demoraga, Re: ÚLTIMO). The ubiquitous Spanish music producer Javier Limón best describes this group via an Arnold 40 “At the Crossroads of Literature and Technology” enigmatic jumble of appropriate signs: “Romanticismo trágico asumido. Flamenco vudú (“Assumed tragic romanticism. Flamenco voodoo”; “El Último Grito: Flamenco Electronique”). Demoraga feels a mystical calling to perform this wild electronic flamenco in order to reawaken the duende that he feels has been long lost in both electronic and flamenco practice: La tendencia actual es la de la similitud general: los mismos arreglos, los mismos temas en las canciones, las mismas voces... Pero naturalmente que sí que hay buen flamenco, siempre lo habrá. [sic] Duende ay! Duende... Está un poco dormido. Hay que despertarlo, al Duende hay que llamarlo con sangre y carne. El Duende es un misterioso que todos sentimos y que nadie puede explicar. El Duende es un poder y no un querer, es una lucha a muerte. El Duende no está en la garganta; el Duende duerme en las entrañas y sube y sube hasta la voz... No es una cuestión de facultad, sino de sangre y carne, de viejísima cultura ancestral y al mismo tiempo de creación en el acto. Es el espíritu de la tierra... Y es necesario tener ‘un par de cojones’ para llamarlo y afrontarlo... Duende hay, lo que no hay son las penas que lo mueven. The current trend is that of similitude in general: the same arrangements, the same themes in the same songs, the same voices... But of course there exists good flamenco, as there always will. Duende, alas! Duende... It is a little sleepy. You have to wake it; the duende has to be summoned with blood and flesh. The duende is a mystery that we all feel and nobody can explain. The duende is a power and not a desire; it is a fight to death. The duende doesn ́t come from the throat; the duende sleeps in the guts and rises and rises up to the voice... It's not a question of ability, but of flesh and blood, of a very ancient culture and, at the same time, an onthe-spot creation. It is the spirit of the earth... And you need to have balls to summon it and cope with it... Duende exists, what doesn ́t is the misery that drives it. (Demoraga, Re: ÚLTIMO) According to Demoraga, the Spanish indie rockers, electronic musicians, and flamencos are unable to beckon the duende because they are afraid of the misery it signifies. Demoraga casts the blame for this absent duende on the inability of flamenco musicians to invoke it--either because they fear it, or because they cannot feel it. They lack “the misery that drives it.” And yet Demoraga also supposes that this absence derives from too much present-day agony: “A la gente le dan miedo las penas. No quieren cantar penas porque se sienten que hay tanta pena real... Cuando yo soy feliz no tengo tiempo de escribir canciones felices, estoy viviendo. Cuando uno está triste o tiene pena, siente y siente y escribe” (“People [nowadays] are afraid of penas. They don’t want to sing sorrow because they already feel enough real pain as it is. When I am happy I don’t have time to write happy songs. I am living. When someone is truly down and full of grief, one feels, and one feels, and one writes”; Demoraga Interview). Demoraga seems to express conflicting thoughts in the prior two quotes. He states that the misery that drives duende no longer exists but also that no one wants to sing sorrow because they already feel enough real pain as it is. So which is it? Is there too much pena in contemporary Spanish society or not enough? Demoraga’s vision of the duende, penas, and the lack thereof in Spanish music today is expanded below by the post punk, Nomenclatura: Aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos Volume 3, 2014 Arnold 41 gothic troubadour Nick Cave, citing Lorca, to describe almost all contemporary rock music production: In his brilliant lecture, The Theory and Function of Duende, Frederico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives at the heart of certain works of art. ‘All that has dark sounds has ‘duende’,’ he says, ‘that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.’ In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have at its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes but true sadness, rarely . . . all in all, it would appear that ‘duende’ is too fragile to survive the compulsive modernity of the music industry. In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class, where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror. Sadness or ‘duende’ needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. I feel sorry for sadness, as we jump all over it, denying its voice and muscling it into the outer reaches. No wonder sorrow doesn't smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad (Cave 7-8). Demoraga’s and Cave’s critiques of the contemporary rock music industry as mystical call to arms against modernity may for some readers seem slightly reminiscent of the regressive, mystical, and anti-rationalist nostalgia politics of twentieth-century fascism. Nonetheless, the fundamental difference between these two antimodern perspectives is the kind of nostalgia which they draw on (reflective vs. restorative) which directly relates to the ends of their respective nostalgias (italics are for emphasis). Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. (Boym xviii) Although there exist elements of what Boym refers to as the “restorative” in the nostalgia of both poets, Demoraga, like Nick Cave, explicitly aims to perform the reflective nostalgic sentiment underlying the kind of duende evoked in Lorca’s poetry: Poema del cante jondo (1921), Canciones (1927), and Primeras canciones (1936). Unlike their critiques above, the lyricism of Cave and Demoraga is not anti-modern but rather seeks to explore the complexity of emotions that has been extricated from much mainstream pop music. They focus on the penas of modernity which others are perhaps unable or afraid to express. Live, Demoraga and El Último Grito invoke the duende spirit, exhorting reconnection with the emotional extremities many of us lost an immediate connection with in the digital age: joy and sorrow, love and hate, fear and peace. They are not luddites. Nor do they hold notions of some triumphant return to Reconquest Spain. They do, however, wish to reflect on what has been sacrificed in Spain’s pursuit for modernity. Arnold 42 “At the Crossroads of Literature and Technology” El Último Grito’s song “Iglesia abandonada” combines several different flamenco palos in its weaving of a tapestry lament for the abandoned duende soul of the flamenco of yore: the first verse is set to bulerías, the second to a hybrid Arabic-Andalusian pattern, the third to the flamenco palo known as tangos. The reverence paid by El Último Grito to the patrimony of traditional flamenco is referenced in its titular metaphor as church. The loss of this flamenco church, deserted by the once faithful Spanish souls, is alluded to in the adjective abandonada (abandoned). Demoraga sings of its downfall and redemption (English translation is in italics): Perseguiré, perseguiré... I will pursue, I will pursue... Los rastros deste afán, The traces of this desire, como busca el agua a la sed, as water searches for thirst, como busca el rio a la mar, as the river seeks the sea, la estela de tu perfume. the trail of your scent. Yo tenía, I used to have, yo tenía un alma. I used to have a soul. Yo tenía, I used to have, yo tenía un cuerpo... I used to have a body... Yo tenía, I used to have, yo tenía un sueño. I used to have a dream. Yo tenía, I used to have, yo tenía todo. I used to have everything. Yo tenía, I used to have, y ya no lo tengo. but no longer. Yo tenía, I used to have, yo tenía un alma... I used to have a soul... Y ya no lo tengo. But no longer. ¿Regresarás? ¡No sé! Will you return? I don ́t know! Me atravesó tu suave vendaval, Your soft gale pierced me. Rumbo a tu recuerdo seguí, I followed the path of your memory, la senda de tu perfume. the trail of your scent. No hay soledad There is no solitude que aguante el turbión, able to withstand the flood, el impulso antiguo y sutil, the ancient and subtle impulse del eco de tu perfume... of the echo of your perfume... (Demoraga and El Último Grito) The first verse of “Iglesia abandonada” [Click on the link to hear the song] begins with a playful mix of piano, synthesizers, sporadic cymbals, and palmas (notice the hyperlink over “Iglesia abandonada”). The lyrics represent El Último Grito’s quest for an elusive and always already absent flamenco purity and index the mirror reflection of the hunt, inverting the scent of the flamenco trail with the trail of the flamenco scent. It Nomenclatura: Aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos Volume 3, 2014 Arnold 43 is as if flamenco were like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of pebbles to find the way home, and Demoraga the bloodhound, following the stones to speed up the process. A melancholic tenor is then introduced via the contrapuntal texture of several hybrid Arabic-Andalusian music symbols, especially with respect to percussive elements such as the darbuka, interspersed with off-beat palmas and pounding rhythmic synthesizers. This musical shift signals a change in tone from hopeful chase to weepy nostalgia, a nostalgia for all that flamenco has lost: the soul, the body, the dream... everything. The musical and lyrical transition is further underscored by a change in the locus of enunciation. The following lyrics come from the perspective of flamenco incarnate. The third stanza is punctuated by yet another change which returns to the instrumentation used in the beginning of the song set to a tangos (instead of a bulerías) palo. The lyrics also bring us back into the perspective of the protagonist tracking flamenco, instead of flamenco itself. Demoraga as hunter finally realizes that his efforts are futile. Flamenco will return regardless of his endeavors. Those souls who had once gone astray—those who had lost touch with the mystical duende dwelling within—will be brought back into the fold in time. Demoraga is not seeking to restore the soul, the body, and the dream of some mythical Spanish past. He instead laments the loss of flamenco’s aesthetic, cathartic, and political potential: the early twentieth-century flamenco expression of penas was itself at times indirectly political. The isolation alluded to in the final half of this stanza draws a temporal dichotomy between the communal spirit brought by the lost traditional flamenco culture and the soledad experienced by the individualistic mentality of present-day Spanish society. With the vast amount of downloadable entertainment, made increasingly available by every incremental upgrade in the speed of internet connectivity, who needs to ever leave the house? With ever more rapid-fire communication potential, provided via every new iPhone upgrade, why converse with a friend while carousing Malasaña when you can post on Facebook that you are conversing with a friend while carousing Malasaña? Technology can isolate, but it can also efficiently unify. The exponential growth of the nation-wide youth protest movement, beginning on May 15, 2011, led by Los Indignados (The outraged) would be hard to imagine without the aid of rapid communication provided by social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The ability for closely connected communal circles to quickly correspond with each other has been available for some time now. The universal acceptance of Facebook and Twitter, as the de facto modes of communication for youth, has just expanded this intimate network to extend throughout the entirety of nearly every imagined community. The national imagined community is itself beginning to lose meaning as social networks progressively erode preconceived boundaries of any inherently shared national identity. For Demoraga, nostalgia functions not as a means to destroy the global communal connections that technology has made possible, but to reinforce the local communal connections through pena and the duende, with all of the aesthetic and political weight that these two terms historically imply. In “Iglesia abandonada,” Demoraga reminds his Spanish audience to be aware of the penas of yore and to beware the penas yet to come: “yo tenía un sueño...yo tenía todo...y ya no lo tengo.” With over half of Spanish youths under the age of 25 unemployed, Spain is undoubtedly experiencing widespread pena now (Allen 4). What Demoraga Arnold 44 “At the Crossroads of Literature and Technology” believes it lacks is the pure flamenco expression— the cathartic quejío—with which to address them. The flamenco church of infinite penas has been abandoned. The duende is nearly dead. The flock has dispersed in pursuit of individualistic material pleasures. All is lost...but not for long. Flamenco purity will be restored. A purity—lest we forget— called for by an avant-garde, experimental, indie electronic neoflamenco band based out of Paris. Nomenclatura: Aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos Volume 3, 2014 Arnold 45