After years of traversing the hemisphere, music journalist Vic Paz’s quest to document the breadth of talent in Latin American electronic music will make it to film. Paz just released the trailer for El Club del Ritmo, a film based on hundreds of interviews he conducted with the people shaping club music in Latin America today.
I first met Paz in his natural element: in a major city, where he was staying in the spare room of a top DJ and conducting interviews with badass producers (Mexico City, Rosa Pistola and Bruno OG, in this case). Paz had just flown into town from a different country with his audio recorder and camera, and told me he had a bus to catch early in the morning, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually make.
For the past three years, this has been Paz’s nomadic life. That night he told me that the interview project began in 2013 as part of his doctoral degree at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (or UC3M, to use the school’s very dope acronym), but that it expanded past the dissertation format. The work has already resulted in an ongoing column for Thump Mexico that explores the careers of its musical subjects by highlighting exactly 10 facts about their work, an attempt to start sharing the knowledge Paz has accumulated throughout the Club del Ritmo project.
The work is also a love letter to sounds created by Latinos, for Latinos. As Paz told Thump in a recent interview: “In Latin America, we’re all about loving the foreign and overlooking what’s ours. Until we see the woman with a new boyfriend we don’t pay her any attention; that’s what happens to us with the music.”
Here’s hoping that the documentary will draw some interesting conclusions about the revolutionary and constantly expanding electronic scene in the region. Some of the studio luminaries Paz interviewed are Afrodita, NAAFI, Toy Selectah, Happy Colors, the Gold Frame Records crew, Deltatron, Valesuchi, and Alejandro Paz (It’s a pretty dude-heavy lineup, but to be honest, so is the music industry, so take issue with institutional sexism instead of Paz’s editorial philosophy if you must).
Paz says that the documentary will be released at a to-be-determined music festival in 2017. Astoundingly, given the amount of work that has already gone into the project, he says there are still some producers and DJs he has left to interview, and that he’ll be spending the rest of the year doing just that.