The morning of January 1st I found myself in a cab, going from Bariloche to Villa Catedral. We were all squished in together (there were five of us, an illegal amount of passengers), and to make the trip shorter we wound up talking about literature. Esteban Bigliardi, one of my fellow passengers, had been reading Cheever. I mentioned I’d just read “The Swimmer” that very same day (the book was on the living room’s table and was an old debt, insofar as a good reader is always in debt); our hostess, intrigued and turning back, asked me if I could tell her what it was about. Following a party, drink in hand, a fifty-year-old man decides to cross the county by swimming through his neighbors’ pools. I wasn’t brilliant, but for a while we forgot we were packed in, sticking our elbows into each others’ ribs. When we reached the welcome of the cabin, my hands now free, I checked my Twitter account with what little remaining signal there was. The only tweet at that time was by Santiago Motorizado and read:

I’m going to return home through the swimming pools.

Santiago is from La Plata, my city, and from frozen Patagonia it seemed to me that his home was my home and his return was my own. Even more: it turned out Bigli and his girlfriend were good friends of Chango, as he is known to those close to him, and the coincidence made me feel like his friend too. We sent him our love by DM and, right before sunrise, decided that yes, it would definitely be a good year.

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The tweet elegantly resolves what I couldn’t do in the cab: it summarizes the essence of the story. That’s how lyrics work in Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado [He Killed a Motor Unit Policeman], the band in which Chango plays bass, writes lyrics, sings, and even designs (album) covers: a few lines express more than what they say, like an urban haiku, weaving the nest of a story. The band was born in 2003, way before Twitter, but it’s necessary to remember that Twitter does not create a style but materializes something which was already there and which can be traced to previous and later works like Reader's Block David Markson or Mi nombre es Rufus by Juan Terranova.

Three of the five discs by Él Mató make up a trilogy dealing with the vital cycle: birth, life, and death. The lyrics, progressively more concise, are in tune with the bluntness of both melody and concept. The first one (Navidad de reserva, 2005) is based on the ambiguity of the popular party every adult seems to hate: “the cops chase you / on Christmas day / it’s the party I promised you,” and it only allows itself to add “I look up at the sky huddled in the darkness” like a dog tied to the fireworks. The second album (Un millón de euros, 2006) opens up with a track made up by a single verse: “I hope you return, roadtrip girl.” Like a mantra, its verses gain new layers of meaning thanks to a growing intonation and a careful repetition, in the same way a song grows after being listened to again and again on the way to work, to the supermarket, or to the indoor soccer field.





The concept behind the trilogy allows one to glimpse both appropriations and foresight: the last track is titled “Tongues of fire in the sky,” and introduces the apocalyptic theme of the last album in the cycle (Día de los muertos, 2008). The imagery of disaster is the setting for this superior disc, one which doesn’t lack tenderness: “your blond hair floats in / the hurricane’s wind.” In “My next movement,” the narrator (five verses are enough to make him one) is on his rooftop of his house holding a rifle, admiring the odd beauty of the world: like Sisyphus, another master of repetition, we must think of him as a lucky person.



There are more appropriations: Vienen bajando, the title of the first Argentine anthology of zombie stories, edited by CEC in 2011, comes from the second disc: “they’re coming down / the restless multitudes / with their broken back / in the spring festivities.” What might seem to refer to the painful retreat of the always savage celebration of Student Day, in the third disc alludes to the broken bodies of the living dead, which re-sprout like flowers after winter.

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Same as superheroes, all the band members have alter egos: Santiago Motorizado is joined by Doctora Muerte (drums), Pantrö Puto (guitar), Niño Elefante (guitar), and Chatrán Chatrán (keyboards). “Bricks of harmony cemented with distortion and friendship,” is how they describe themselves. Some people call it psychedelic rock, others space rock; I prefer their discs’ tags on bandcamp: alternative, rustic, indie rock, apocalyptic pop, kraut from beyond, travel, life. They were all produced by the Laptra label, the spearhead of indie music from La Plata, an arts collective and club of friends where every band can self-manage their own disc.

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Four years went by before the new and latest disc, La dinastía Scorpio, came out, with twice as many songs as the discs in the trilogy. At the time it turned out to be strangely autobiographical for me: “this cold winter made me think of the two of us” and then “I don’t want to travel and travel / this night I want you to sleep with me.” During those days I was hibernating in Saint-Nazaire, France, an empty port that smelled like a cookie factory; I was bitter and lonely, and the disc stopped me from falling into the easy trap of nostalgia. At night I’d bundle up to go out for a walk and sing in Spanish: “my favorite day of the month / I hope you’re doing well / in your new house with him / with his laughter that never leaves / new discs, new drugs”; I always ran out of breath in the last part, which is repeated infinitely. I take this song to be a little story where the first and last verse form a pair, that make sense out of the sequence of the three interior verses (the breakup) through music (the day when you get paid and spend the money at the record store). After I came back, my girlfriend said to me: “did you notice that in France no one sings on the street?” It was true, we were the only ones, and I felt happy.



I could spend the night transcribing songs. That’s what Walter Lezcano did: he compiled the lyrics of the Él Mató trilogy and published them in a very beautiful book called La ruta del sol. The faithful transcription includes the repetitions, particular to the oral nature of music, those which don’t belong to the sobriety of the page (would you have to repeat the verses of a haiku if it’s sung? surely). In the previously unpublished interview with which the book ends, Chango says: “I’m moved by things that don’t make much sense.” Perhaps that way, like he did with Cheever on that New Year’s night, he summed up the essence of his band in a few words.