The style known as electro has no single origin, but its lineage can be traced back to a few fairly clear antecedents. Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force’s 1982 single “Planet Rock” canonized the syncopated rhythmic cadence, played on the Roland TR-808 drum machine, that is central to the style; that song was partly inspired by the lurching, snapping beat of Kraftwerk’s “Numbers,” from 1981. The Germans had probably been listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto, who deployed the same whip-crack syncopations on 1980’s “Riot in Lagos.” But beating them all to the punch was a Miami group called Herman Kelly & Life, who laid down that signature beat in 1978, in a rousing Latin funk song called “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat” that would go on to be a major influence on Miami bass, a regional variant of electro.
Electro’s Latin roots have often been overlooked, but they’re at the center of Afro-Cuban Electronics, the debut album from Miami’s Alpha 606, which fuses the booming and hissing 808s of classic electro with congas, clave, guiro, and other Afro-Cuban percussion instruments. The project dates back to the early 2000s. Originally, it was a group comprising producers Armando Martinez and Rey Rubio and percussionists Marino Hernandez and Danny Chirino, all of Cuban descent (Hernandez, in fact, arrived on Floridian shores in 1980’s Mariel boatlift). They put out their debut EP in 2005, with a remix from fellow Miami electro experimentalists Phoenecia. By 2008, when Detroit’s Interdimensional Transmissions label released the Electrónica Afro-Cubano EP, only Martinez remained, and he continues solo on Afro-Cuban Electronics.
The sound of the music will be familiar to anyone who has heard Hashim’s “Al Naafiysh (The Soul),” Newcleus’ “Jam on It,” or any other classic in the electro pantheon; one of electro’s salient features it that it simply doesn’t change very much. It all comes down to syncopated 808 patterns, skeletal synth bass, and not much more, and Martinez remains faithful to the blueprint. Even without the Afro-Cuban addition, electro enthusiasts would find plenty to love here: His rhythms move with the easy grace of a jungle cat flicking its tail; his drums are as crisp as you could ask for, and his synthesizers shimmer with a vivid, sci-fi sheen.
But the added percussion greatly adds to the music’s dynamism, filling in the empty space with rolling rhythmic counterpoints. On “Shake,” the two opposing rhythmic figures—guiro and clave patterns against snapping kicks and claps—bob like double needles on a sewing machine, zipping in and out of each other’s way. The Latin percussion also does wonders for the music’s tone colors, lending a warm, glassy glow to the Roland’s dry thump and scratch. Often, Martinez leaves his percussion elements relatively unadulterated, but occasionally, as on “Endangered Cuban Crocodile,” he leans hard on the effects, running the congas through heavy compression and reverb; the results sound a little like if Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations had an explicit Latin underpinning.
Martinez does his best to keep things varied; tempos range from a skulking, 110-BPM four-to-the-floor up to 170-BPM rollers. Still, at 13 tracks and nearly an hour (plus a different bonus cut on both the vinyl and digital editions), the album feels a little long. For the most part, these are drum workouts, not songs, per se, and the palette begins to blur together by the record’s end, even with two vocal tracks to break things up.
On “Engineered Floatation Device” (sic), the heavily processed vocals speak to the experience of Cuban exiles who fled their island home in small boats and rafts, and the song is dark and alluring, with a silver lining of a synthesizer arpeggio. “Defection” covers similar ground, but its chanted couplets and militant theme—“Defection was our only choice/It happened when you first oppressed our voice/We did not retreat from the attack/ We’ve been deep in the swamp working our way back”—feel a little like empty bravado. And the fact that Cuba’s exiled “freedom fighters” left a trail of blood behind them might leave a bad taste in the listener’s mouth: Alpha 606 is named in tribute to Alpha 66, an anti-Castro paramilitary group, founded by Cuban exiles, that allegedly carried out terrorist attacks on tourist targets in Cuba. The style of the track is clearly meant to recall Drexciya, the Detroit electro act who created an Afrofuturist mythology around a supposed race of subaquatic beings who were born to pregnant women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. But Drexciya’s underwater resistance was an imaginary conceit, and a utopian one at that. Alpha 606 is best when it lets the drums do the talking, and the only thing that goes boom is the kick on the 808.
