Lost in Translation: Listening to Music in a Foreign Language

My opening gambit with Marco Antonio Jiménez Gallardo, AKA Tony Gallardo, DBA María y José, was perhaps a bit overenthusiastic. More of a sortie, really: a hyperspeed carpet-bombing of queries about not touring anywhere outside of Mexico, the lack of distribution for his music, the paucity of press surrounding his new record, if breaking out anywhere else really mattered to him. I sent him a full two paragraphs of questions, one after another. And then, for a week, nothing.

It was a little overwhelming, particularly for someone who'd already expressed reservations about his second (or maybe third or fourth) language. There's a video interview with him that finds him starting in what scans like perfectly acceptable English, drawing out basic facts about himself, then switching back to Spanish almost immediately for a thoughtful examination of his music, his scene, his city. After shaving down my queries to something more manageable, the answers I get back are brief and to-the-point.

Up until then, I'd mainly been grooving on the club-friendly irony on his new one, C L U B N E G R O. Mostly gone is the hypnagogic, psychedelic weirdness of his early singles, in favor of something more clipped, spikier and sharper. Its straight-faced son and pop melodies, and their contrast with the pins-and-needles rhythms, strike as the sort of perfectly-pitched, low-slung joke that can carry 45 minutes. My Spanish isn't remotely up to the task of translation, not without serious assistance. "It's about the violence that happened in Mexico not too long ago and about love and how it destroys you from the inside out," he says.

Now I can't hear anything else.

The residents of Tijuana are going out again. After years of brutal narco violence in the streets, and the Calderón government's largely destructive response, people have gotten fed up with imprisoning themselves in their homes at night. They've opened clubs and bars, and made new music to fill them. They've attracted writers penning reams of booster-ish prose proclaiming the ascendance of the area's arts and culture, and in particular a scene that began bubbling up a few years ago called ruidoson.

Its name is a portmanteau combining the music's progressive, transgressive streak (ruido is, roughly, "noise"), and its link to tradition (son being a local music, brought over from Cuba about a hundred years ago). Around 2009, a small group of musicians – the fried Casios of Los Macuanos; the cut-and-paste electro of Santos; and Gallardo, among others – started gigging around Tijuana under the ruidoson umbrella, and, in its hyper-local fashion, took off. Gallardo, as María y José, released an EP called Espíritu Invisible in 2010, and its title track is still referenced as a scene touchstone. Woozy and slurred, relentless and blaring, all of it covered in a grimy smear of white noise, and barely decipherable. The only words I can make out are "los sueños de juventud": “the dreams of youth.”

On C L U B N E G R O, almost all of that is gone. The mix is near-empty, emphasizing the short shocks of percussion – too punchy for background listening, too broken for clubs – his conversational, even-keeled voice, and strange, almost Dadaist compositional choices. "Granada" begins with a choice cumbia shuffle and Gallardo just about impersonating a cat's meow. His sing-song of mental distress and blowing everything up – I think – barely fogs the mirror. The "boom boom boom"'s that precede "Cripto Real"'s death-defying earworm choruses are always preceded by a body part. First, "corazón," intimating a love song out of context, followed by "cabeza." The "partito" on escalating banger "Kibosé" might refer to friendliness ("yo soy partito / yo no se"; it's placed as an adjective) or to a political party. Could go either way.

A dearth of knowledge is often an opportunity for less-than-incisive questions, so I just ask him what his music is about. He cops freely to the irony at its core, which perhaps kills the vibe a little, adding that he's "not a funny guy." That's debatable – I think he means that he's not a comedian – but the bouncy shoulder-sway of the music doesn't hide the gallows humor. At least not anymore.

I ask around the question of whether or not the language barrier also keeps potential fans from accessing his music, or himself from accessing them. He mentions a few past, and passed, chances to play in the US. The only thing standing in the way is a visa.

To enter the US from Mexico for the purposes of work, one requires a TN-2 (Trade NAFTA) Visa from the US consulate. There is a per annum limit on the number of visas issued. No, that information is not public, but estimates put it around 4,000 to 5,000. There is a list of NAFTA-friendly jobs, provided by the US Department of Immigration. "Musician" is not on that list.

Some proof of employment, or the active sponsorship of an employer, is of course required for a stay of any term. A visa could be supplied for a short-term or one-off job, like a musical performance, given a contract with a US business entity – a promoter or venue – no matter the work. For more well-known acts, Café Tacuba for instance, a booking agent in the US would have ready protocols, as would larger venues. Smaller venues will not. Musicians without booking agents in the US, meaning most of them, will not.

"We are a band that tries to put a lot of emphasis in our lyrics, in our language, Spanish that is extremely rich in expressivity and has many dimensions that we still can't cover completely, so the fact of making music in another language that is not our own, honestly, is not in our plans."

There have been some misunderstandings between Chilean dream-pop duo Dënver and I. Somewhere between me asking about the band to their manager Aldo, Aldo translating and passing it along to the band's songwriter Milton, Milton passing his answers back to Aldo, and Aldo translating them back to me, my question about their intentions, or lack thereof, to break into non-Spanish-speaking markets turned into one about why Milton doesn't write his songs in English. Though the point about the fungibility of Spanish – so many words with so many meanings, so many juicy idioms – is well taken.

Nothing by way of an answer to the actual question of whether the language barrier is high enough to be restrictive. Which is probably just as well: as per Gallardo, "Yeah, I wanna break there, I want to be recognized everywhere and play wherever the people want me to play," is an answer that applies perfectly well to most bands anywhere. As for distribution, Gallardo has gotten around that by giving basically all of María y José's music away for free.

Dënver make big-sounding bedroom pop. Think Belle and Sebastian, but with more emphasis on the body: more disco, more sun-baked sway, more wind through the hair, more wafting choruses. But over the course of two albums, a pattern has developed, particularly apparent, to me, through their album and song titles. Música, Gramática, Gimnasia from 2010, with its gymnast on the cover; this year's Fuera de Campo. All over the place, references to sports, particularly gymnastics (the "campo" in the latter title is probably "field," like for sports, but could also be the other, wilder kind of field). When I ask Milton-via-Aldo about this, his response is beautifully, deliciously strange:

"More than gymnastics itself, we are interested in disciplines that people assume. Perseverance, training, things that people do who decide to give themselves to a task, repress, and that require will beyond human limits. These are like small dictatorships that make people achieve superior levels in specific skills, just as if they we touching human perfection with the tip of their toes. Of course, this perfection is apparent, everything that shines has its dark side and this darkness comes from the restrictions we put in our way, this are subjects we like to work with."

It may not be that the language barrier is keeping anyone back at all. It's hard to say from either their or my vantage point. But I'll likely never get the full breadth of Milton's obsessions directly, without having to ask, and that almost feels a bit like a loss. Almost.

Interested to hear more? Be sure to visit the radio show highlighting the best in alternative Iberoamerican music, Red Bull Panamérika.