If the voice is the original instrument, as avant-garde composer Joan La Barbara once put it, then perhaps frogs are the original synthesizer. Is there another creature on the planet capable of generating more brain-scramblingly otherworldly sounds? Just consider the recordings that Dutch researcher Felix Hess made in Australia and Mexico in the 1980s: His subjectsâ expansive array of growling, clicking, and zapping could give the fanciest modular setup a run for its money. Frogs feature prominently in the work of Uruguayan electronic musician Lechuga Zafiro, a.k.a. Pablo de Vargas: Six years after he released a song called âSapo Diablo,â or âDevil Toad,â he delves deeper into amphibian imagery with his debut album, Desde Los OÃdos de un Sapo (From the Ears of a Toad). The title isnât merely metaphorical: The albumâs spellbinding sound design was made in part using field recordings of toadsâalong with the sounds of birds, pigs, sea lions, water, metal, wood, rock, glass, and plastic.
De Vargasâ sound-gathering, carried out across South and Central America, China, and Portugal, yields a bracingly original palette with unusual heft. His drums frequently have the thwack of hollowed-out logs; in âTero Sex (Danza Para Piedra Volcánica y Tero),â they suggest stones being struck, while slapback reverb creates the claustrophobic impression of being deep in a cave. Splashing liquid assumes rhythmic forms in âAgua de Vidrio,â recalling the water drumming of the Baka people of Cameroon and Gabonâcombined, perhaps, with the clang of a blacksmithâs shop. But with rare exceptions, itâs never clear where any given sound may have come from, and de Vargas delights in using digital processes to smear and distort the sounds of nature into unrecognizable shapes. The end result feels a little bit like standing in a holodeck whose screen is falling in jagged shards.
Itâs not just Lechuga Zafiroâs sounds that are original. Nothing here falls neatly under the umbrella of any established subgenre. Track after trackâand sometimes measure by measureâhe seems determined to rewrite the rules of club music. âOreja Ãcidaâ opens the album with lumbering stop-start triplet patterns, then explodes into hyperspeed drum breaks. âBotellharpaâ stretches a pitch-bent sample of harp, or maybe guitar, over a quick-stepping, dembow-propelled 4/4 groove, using pockets of silence and queasy glissandi to wreak havoc on the rolling flow. Lechuga Zafiroâs percussive patterns would be plenty powerful even if programmed using conventional drum sounds, or simply banged out on sticks. But theyâre all the more compelling for the way that unfamiliar timbres fuse with knotty rhythms. The movements of his beats feel dictated by the physical resistance of three-dimensional objects pushing through air; the peculiar microrhythms of his syncopations seem to stem directly from the contours of his samples.
