Zizek
Named after the Slovenian philosopher with a penchant for pushing the envelope, Zizek came out of the cosmopolitan cultural capital of South America. Formed out of a ravaged Buenos Aires social scene that was practically destroyed after a major club fire in 2004, Zizek began as a weekly party destination for experimental DJs. It became a place for collaborating with hip-hop, dancehall, electronica, and cumbia sounds within the city's rich underground.
"After the Cromanon club fire, there were very few new options in the Buenos Aires nightlife," explains Zizek co-founder and ZZK Records president Grant "El G" Dull. "While dancing was the norm before, all of a sudden, there were 'NO DANCING' signs that went up in places that used to be caverns for underground fun. Independent producers and promoters took few chances and smaller places suffered with city code regulations, now enforced heavily, and many ended up closing or rather never opening again. Zizek's co-founder Nim found a place magically open in the midst of all this, a tango joint in the middle of San Telmo."
As promoters Nim and Dull (an American living in Buenos Aires) joined forces, they recruited local experimental cumbia master Villa Diamante to be Zizek's resident DJ. "The 'experimental cumbia' scene here was very inspiring and an instigator for a lot of new producers to explore this facet," Dull says. "People have been messing around with cumbia and electronic beats for quite some time. Zizek gave a platform, audience and spotlight for all these sounds to become heard. The dance floor was our laboratory, the internet our megaphone."
The collective released their international debut ZZK Sound Vol. 1 in 2008, and followed it up with the critically-acclaimed ZZK Vol. 2 in 2009. Many of the producers on the second album are ex-pats in foreign lands and remix music through an outsider's lens. Montreal's Ghislain Poirier remixes Mendoza's Fauna, Alex Pasternak remixes Colombian/Argentine American Lulacruza and Douster, the Buenos-Aires based French ex-pat, remixes Zonora Point, Chilean hip-hop heads who once called Buenos Aires home. Then there's Oro11, a Northern hemisphere cumbia beat maker, who spent several years living on South American soil. If ZZK Sound Vol. 1 took cumbia from Argentina to the outside world, Vol. 2 is the return trip.