Something I Really Wanted for Reggaeton Kelman Duran

To be honest I only thought of it once someone mentioned it to me. When I’ve first started making music, there was not much to it. I guess people took me overly seriously because I went to art school.

It was during a radio show at Mixpak. Wildlife! [see zweikommasieben #6] told me, “Hey, I really like the stuff you are doing—dancehall and ambient.” And I was like, “Yeah, I do listen to a lot of ambient music…” I consciously applied that idea in the second album, 13th Month. The last track of the first album, “Introductions,” was the start actually—I put it in 1804 Kids at the last minute.

Maybe it was because I wanted to listen to the lyrics of those songs more, to avoid having drums in the foreground. But I wasn’t scheming to formulate it… Maybe it has to do with the fact that I did go to art school. I think for my music I wanted to resist using philosophical language to justify what I do. This language is great I think, and eventually it is important. But I didn’t think of it when I made the first album. Neither the second. And I won’t even think of it when I make the third. Maybe much later it will be relevant for my music.

No, I’m not fed up with it. It’s just that I didn’t want it attached to the making of my music. I really like art school but it takes the poetry out of everything—at least Kyle Art did, the school I went to. You have to have a reason for every single decision. And you have to be able to justify that reason and write really well about it. Which is a good skill to have, but I wasn’t doing that with music. I didn’t have much to do at that time. I didn’t wanna work. So I just made music in my room.

Yeah. I remember a journalist in New York City came up to me and said, “Your album title is terrible, because it makes the music conceptual.” He was screaming at me that high-pitched voices have nothing to do with the Haitian Revolution. And you know what? I think he was right to a certain extent. So for the second album, I took a year. I said to myself, “maybe then think harder!” I tried to think more about it, even if I think there is still a problem applying a conceptual framework to an album because there are just too many variables to account for. And I don’t know if I actually can physically or mentally account for every sample that’s in there. But at least I felt like I had given it enough thought.

For the first album, I was rediscovering the genre of reggaeton. Have you ever been on radiomusic.com? It’s a crazy website—there are thousands of people rating your music. It’s really nerdy. They categorize me as plunderphonics. I read an essay—I think it’s by a sound philosopher from the eighties* —and it says plunderphonics is when you take popular music and change the content a bit. When I read it, I was like, “oh yeah that makes sense.” Anyway, I grew up listening to reggaeton, but then I was really into different music. I think art school made me listen only to specific people. When I left art school I realized that I actually really liked reggaeton—a kind of music people say does not have much to it. For 13th Month, I’ve actually thought a lot about what I would sample. I consciously choose artists that are form the dancehall scene, and choirs from Europe that sing in minor, and then just a lot of things that I can’t account for—the last song has a Damian Marley sample for example. I took it because he sampled Ella Fitzgerald—and because that sample was already there, it made sense to me to use it.

I am not really reconsidering. I just wanna have a deeper connection to the people behind the tracks. I want to meet them. Some people I have reached out to actually—Masicka for example, who is a dancehall artist. I think now he’s really famous. I should be careful. But I also don’t know how the record industry in Jamaica works. So if I’m gonna sample him again, I want somebody to send me there.

Yes, some of them I have met, which can be surprising. I recently got to know Bamba Pana, a group from Tanzania. The music they do is so fast—faster than I play it actually. But they are the most low energy people I’ve ever met. Makaveli, the guy who raps on it, is really high-energy when he gets on stage, but the producer is like [acting slow]… I’ve also been to Portugal recently and when I played their stuff, they were so happy. Instead of being like, “don’t play my music, don’t edit my stuff,” they gave me more. Someone told me that my favorite producer from there, Anderson TxiGa, is a truck driver and that he does music for a hobby. I couldn’t believe it—the guy has hundreds of songs. It’s really minimal, as if he makes them for people to sample.

Yeah. And lot of my favorite artists and film makers are minimalist. I actually like when things are simple. That I definitely took from art school. I get sensory overload by a lot of things. I can’t have too much going on—it confuses me. So I take a couple of sentences and a couple of elements even though they could be totally unrelated, cause it helps me to focus. That may have something to do with the pathological impact of social media—I have noticed me being less patient with certain things. I feel like I used to look at things a lot longer. Even if I didn’t like it. Recently, I went to the Biennale in Venice and at a certain point it was just too much—I wasn’t able to separate the politics from the art anymore, and I got angry about the market stuff. The explanatory tags for the artworks seemed so lofty. But I try to be more tolerant…

I know that making music has very little agency, except for myself—the furthest it goes is that sometimes people say that I changed how they listen to music. Which is a nice compliment. But I’m not changing anything and I’m not gonna act like it’s a political thing that I’m doing. The older I get, I realize that I just wanna be happy. But even that has become difficult. I read the news every day and I have to tell myself that I can’t get sad over it because then I’m gonna be apathetic. Some people criticize me for that: “Oh you should be posting more on social media about these things.”

One of my favorite artists is James Benning. He made a film called 13 Lakes, and it’s about 13 lakes. A lot of people are like, “Oh man, you care about landscape, you care about nature, you have all these politics.” But from what I understand, he is political, but not in his art. He is very honest about it. But there is pieces of art, that are able to make a connection. The Swiss pavilion in Venice* I actually really liked. It tells you right away what the show is about. They were like, “We do not feel represented by our governments and do not agree with decisions taken in our name. […] People stop using gender neutral language and move from their polyamorous groups into traditional families. Hate speech not only seems acceptable, but becomes a motor of aggressively arresting us into what is considered a normal life.”* Which is very true. I don’t agree with all the concepts they were talking about, though. They proposed to become this global unity, for example. I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think it’s important for people to have their own communities. Me for example, I grew up as a cis male, and if I can’t be allowed into something that’s fine.

I feel like I have to be self-reflexive about myself and about what I do. I don’t wanna be a sociopath. And a lot of DJs turn into sociopaths. I also don’t wanna quit, because I hate the culture. A lot of DJs are like, “I’m so done with this. It’s so fake.” I don’t wanna let that get to me. So I wanna keep myself grounded and be like, “This is great, I’m having fun. I feel really privileged to be doing this.” And I decided that I’m going to be hard-headed about it. At a certain point, if I was starving and I wasn’t making money, then I would just quit and do something else. Just like a “normal” person. …I think it’s not my destiny to sign with a label, open up for famous people, or DJ in the Hollywood Hills. That’s not even worth my rent. I think I’m a bit romantic or nostalgic or whatever it is.

I really wanna be accepted by that crowd, too. It’s important for me to play in Puerto Rico at one point, and to have a good show in the Dominican Republic. But to them I am not Dominican enough. For some people, it goes even further than that. They say, “oh, you’re just a hipster who makes reggaeton for other hipsters.” Some of my friends from the Dominican Republic, who produce real dembow, understand it however, because they get the references. Cromo X, for example, he’s like, “Oh yes, you did what Playero did.”

Yeah, it’s basically what I did. I started out making mixtapes. But Playero wasn’t conceptualizing and thinking, “oh I’m making edits.” He obviously wasn’t sampling ambient music either, but he edited, he used vocals. It’s really nice to see him being rediscovered now by young people. He is a hero. But to answer your question from before: in my Boiler Room set people had comments like, “I bet he won’t play this in Puerto Rico”—stuff like this. But I also get comments like, “I never took reggaeton seriously until I heard this guy.”

I think at this point there are so many of us that the genre is so vast. I love Dinamarca, but his reggaeton sounds way different than mine. Rosa Pistola’s reggaeton is totally different too. All these people have their own vocabulary, as you said. And that’s something I really wanted for reggaeton.