National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

Dee-Lite may have sung about the global village and the age of communication back in 1990, but it's taken until the 21st century for that dream to become a reality in music. Now the new world music has arrived and nobody presents it better than 24 year old Pablo Diaz-Reixa – aka El Guincho – a musician based in Barcelona and raised in the Canary Islands, who feeds traditional island song, African rhythms and sampled psychedelics through an MPC to create something entirely new.

"Palmitos Park," the first single from his debut album Alegranza, gets the party started with an infectious Spanish chorus, male harmonies and the sounds of a village cheering and celebrating. Then there's the rustic rave of "Cuando Maavilla Fui," with its pulsating peasant chanting, as if to raise the dead. "Buenos Matrimonios Ahi Fuera" breezes the sounds of offshore winds and tinkling percussion through childlike playground choruses. And when "Fata Morgana" begins, it's as if somebody is opening the curtains onto the glorious technicolor of 1970s sunshine, with wonky old analogue synths that warp in the heat.

Growing up in the Canary Islands it was pretty hard to get hold of records, so the teenage Pablo had to order them through catalogues. That's when he wasn't busy accompanying his environmental inspector father around the islands by boat to check out the mountains, sand and sea. Or listening to his granny singing in a polyphonic choir and teaching him about folk opera. Or trying to impress girls on the beach with his surfing technique.

A year at school in Paris left him with an abiding love of French rap, which in turn led him to experimental American hip hop. Aged 18, Pablo wrote a collection of short stories, inspired by Latin American magic realism, and won a government prize for writers under 30. With his winnings he moved to Barcelona to write a novel, but it was a disaster, "really creepy and bad" as he puts it, laughing at the memory. When his publishers dumped him, "I stopped writing and started making music."

Falling in with an experimental collective of film students who got him into Moondog and Sun-Ra, he started making beats on his computer and singing too, and ended up touring with a band called Coconut and earning money composing music for documentaries. "This was the toughest training," he says, "one week a director would want cabaret music, the next week it was disco, the next, something Brazilian, so I really learned how to recreate every kind of music. I had to teach myself everything." After ditching a plan to study island music at university in New York, he realized he just needed to buy a sampler and make it instead - Alegranza is the result. He originally pressed up copies himself, traipsing around Spanish record stores with them - they sold in their thousands.

El Guincho is named for a bird from the Canaries that always flies alone, but his music finds finds common ground in the global transfusions of MIA and CSS, the gypsy spirit of Gogol Bordello, the afropop guitars of Vampire Weekend and the ice cream layering of Four Tet and Animal Collective. Yet his music is also thick with the surf harmonies of the Beach Boys, the thrills and spills of tropicalistas like Os Mutantes, and the magic realism that inspired Pablo's literature, bringing musical ghosts to life in the eternal sunshine of the present.

Customs officers round the world have been baffled by this man who travels with computers and broken bits of planks to play live shows where he controls the pile of equipment with his elbows. When you hear the record, you might be baffled too. But then you'll want to play it again and again.