El Aleph/Electroacustica

About 20 years ago – as a new cultural nationalism swept through Argentina – tango became cool again, emerging from its niches. The bandoneón replaced the rock guitar as every young porteño’s tool of seduction… okay, I exaggerate. But the squeezebox did become cool again and young musicians began to attempt to move tango on from Piazzolla and the grand/dusty old days. Leandro Ragusa’s El Aleph, which nicks its title from a famous Borges story, suggests there’s a taste, at least in Buenos Aires, for left-field, cerebral exercises closer to jazz than anything as balletic as ballroom tango.

Over a double album of 13 songs, Ragusa and an army of musicians – playing vibraphone, piano, double bass and assorted wind instruments – offer intriguing if slightly shapeless songs with suitably abstract titles, that aspire to a kind of art-tango music. Pretentious? Of course it is. A triptych of tracks is dedicated to David Lynch. ‘El Pez Dorado’ could be a tango out-take from the second side of Bowie’s Low. ‘La Javanaise’ is a swaying Brel-ish chanson, with Marie-Éve Racine in fine voice. Dissonant, dramatic ‘Vertigo’ has a debt to Piazzolla. If Ragusa’s bandoneón is ever present, it isn’t always to the fore and he sometimes allows all the music to be smothered by freaky programming. Somewhere between the avant-garde digressions of Eduardo Rovira, neo-classical minimalism and a psychedelic version of electro-tango, Ragusa’s experiments are as rootless as they are novel. Definitely one to be heard sitting down.