It takes three to tango | The Arts | The Australian

Since the release of their recording, La Revancha del Tango, in 2001, French-Argentinian outfit Gotan Project seem to have been the soundtrack to every funky cafe and trendy restaurant on the planet. They have launched a whole movement of electronic tango music and spawned a host of imitators.

The latest was in Ridley Scott's movie Matchstick Men, starring Nicolas Cage. Many people thought the music was Gotan's; in fact, it was clever a bastardisation.
It happens on television advertisements, too: at one stage it seemed the group were endorsing an extraordinary number of products.

Most of the time it wasn't them.
French composer, producer and the co-founder of Gotan, Philippe Cohen-Solal, doesn't get it. To get someone to copy us in Matchstick Men is stupid, he told me in Barcelona last year.

We'd be interested in doing it if we were asked. It says that people are past their creative best when they do things like this. On the other hand, I guess it's a measure of our success that people try to copy us in the first place.

Success has apparently come as a surprise to Cohen-Solal and his fellow Gotan founders Christoph Mueller and Eduardo Makaroff.
THERE was a great deal of hype surrounding Gotan Project at the Transmusicales festival in France in 2001. Hype there means something.

In its almost three decades of existence Transmusicales has spawned some significant musicians: Bjork's solo career took off there in 1991, Nirvana blew everybody to bits at about the same time, and French electro heads Daft Punk drew much attention a few years later.
In the smoke-filled sweatbox of a venue in the historic centre of Rennes, Gotan Project performed their first set of eerie, funked-up electronica steeped in tango bandoneon, piano, violins, Spanish guitar, with tango dancers on set, enthralling the 1500 people inside and the hundreds partying in the courtyard.
In Paris a few days later, Cohen-Solal, sitting in the offices of his recording label, Ya Basta, seemed overwhelmed by the fuss.

We were so nervous, wondering whether we were going to pull off the live show, he said.
Before they knew what had hit them, Gotan Project were immersed in a relentless two-year touring program. They signed a record deal with industry heavyweights, XL Recordings, won a BBC award for best world music group and were routinely receiving rave reviews in the press.

They put music inspired by working-class immigrants on the map.
By the end of 2002, a million copies of the album La Revancha del Tango had been sold. In Sydney on a promotional tour, Cohen-Solal still seemed bemused by success.

This has been a lucky record, that's for sure, he said at the time. Everywhere we've travelled over the past year, we've made a point of giving the disc to good people at record labels and there's been a fantastic response.
Gotan have set the bar high when it comes to this kind of music.

World music, for want of a better term, has never worked well on the dance floors of clubs, but La Revancha del Tango changed that. Most of its competition fails to measure up.
I think what works is that the tango music on the disc is the protagonist, not the other way around, Cohen-Solal said in 2002 in Sydney.

We really tried to dig into the musical structure of tango and convey its richness with a deep, fullsound.
It wasn't a fluke. Cohen-Solal, 44, has a long pedigree as a producer and composer.

After working in management at several of the big record companies in France, he began to compose songs for French films.
Later, he worked as a musical consultant on some key films of the '90s, including Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, Lars Von Trier's Europa and Bertrand Tavernier's L'Appat.
It's perhaps not surprising then that La Revancha del Tango and the group's latest disc, Lunatico, have a soundtrack quality to them, an emotional through-line that combines with the political and the sensual.

Cohen-Solal and Swiss-born Mueller began an electronic journey together that included forming fusion outfits such as Boys From Brazil and Stereo Action Unlimited.
Mueller and Cohen-Solal's love of Latin sounds inspired the formation of Gotan, which took shape after they hooked up with the Paris-based Argentinian Makaroff.
Gotan took 12 months off touring in 2004 while they planned their next album.

Their final show of 2003, in the luxurious Palau de la Musica, a modernist masterpiece in the heart of Barcelona, was a knock-out. The lights dimmed and a huge white screen appeared on stage. Old film clips of tango dancers were projected as the musicians, hidden behind a screen, began to play.

Live tango dancers appeared as the rhythm picked up.
A vocalist could be heard, but not seen. After a half-hour the screen was raised to reveal the group decked out in mafia-style suits.

There was a piano, bandoneon, Spanish guitar, a vocalist, and Cohen-Solal and Mueller at the back on the decks. The show was part theatre, part dance, and it came to a thumping end with hip-hop remixes thrown in on the side. After two hours, the Gotan Project had whipped up the audience to rapture.

Fans had a long wait for Gotan's second disc, Lunatico, launched last year, five years after La Revancha del Tango.
Speaking by telephone shortly before its release, Cohen-Solal said he was unimpressed with what he'd been hearing in electronic music in recent times. He and his colleagues decided to move in a more acoustic direction.

We don't want any track to sound like one from the first album, Cohen-Solal said. We've gone deeper into the songs here. There's not one song that sounds the same as the other.

I'm really confident people will be surprised. To tell you the truth, I'm more worried about what we're going to come up with in terms of a stage show. That's a real challenge.

In November in Zurich, the group showed what they made of that challenge. They performed music from their newest single, Diferente, dressed in white and standing against a backdrop of filmed tango dancing again, plus vast landscapes being beamed on to several screens. It was moody, subtler than its predecessor, and the bandoneon and violins were more prominent.

The message is about the environment, a warning that we are becoming detached from the things that matter.
But there's an irony to the show and to the music. Here's a group of people performing tango in svelte suits and flowing dresses in a spiffy venue, looking a million dollars in front of an audience that's part upper-class and monied, part middle-class and middle-aged and part hipster young things.

And yet tango is an art form with its roots in the marginalised immigrant apartments and brothels of Buenos Aires, more than a century ago. And Gotan is French working-class slang for tango.
What would Piazzolla think of Gotan's take on the tango?

Who knows? We can only say that he opened the door for us. Piazzolla was disappointed that tango was on the dance floor and wanted to bring it to the opera, to jazz halls.

We did the opposite and brought it back to the dance floor.
The Gotan Project will play the Perth Concert Hall on March 2, the Sydney Opera House, March 5 and the Arts Centre, Melbourne, March 11.