Acho Estol

Discography
With his band La Chicana, Estol has made many fresh, new additions to the tango songbook. Writing words and music for his long-time collaborator and wife Dolores Solá, he mixes River Plate folk rhythms with tango tropes, a Beat sensibility with a romantic nostalgia, and a punky pleasure in patchworks with a Dadaist’s penchant for cutups. His music, by turns catchy and complex, danceable and dirge-like, works with and for the words. His second solo album, Buenosaurios - an ironic reference to tango’s ambiguous role in modern-day Argentina, where it is a glittering memory of a richer era, an encyclopaedia of national identity, and a cheap retro allusion for electrotangueros - is a new direction. Subtitled ‘Legends of a night lost in tango’, it’s darker, more macho, perhaps more sinister than anything Estol has produced to date, telling the stories of assorted figures trapped in the shadowland that lies between their own myth-fuelled delusions and the ordinariness of their everyday lifes. Idle dreamers, likeable whores, comic criminals, half-hearted knife-fighters, bar-hopping cavemen, rain-soaked gauchos, uncertain astronauts and sunbathing defectors come out of the shadows and up to the mic in a vaudeville fantasy.
Buenosaurios GMC034
4/9/2010