On a densely landscaped block in Miami, a stone’s throw from the Biscayne Bay shoreline, a cover of banyan timber, royal palms and bullet timber ultimately provides solution to a cave. At the least, that’s how Pablo Díaz-Reixa, the musician-producer referred to as El Guincho, likes to explain his house studio within the metropolis’s Coconut Grove space.
A darkish, squat room tucked straight beneath his bed room, the cave is the place Díaz-Reixa spends most of his waking moments. Typically, he’ll notch 12 hours a day there noodling on potential beats, tinkering with the drums or listening by means of stacks of vinyl information he retains by the blending board. “The feeling I get after I’m within the studio, making music, is incomparable,” he tells me on the muggy September day after I go to his place.
Stepping simply exterior his pint-size studio, although, Díaz-Reixa’s personal dwelling area is ample and decidedly un-cavelike. With skylights scattered all through its tall ceilings, his modernist abode exudes a way of calm even along with his toddler son’s toys strewn about. The place was a Buddhist temple, he tells me, which the Dalai Lama blessed over FaceTime earlier than it may turn out to be a house.
Although Díaz-Reixa misses his former (and longtime) house of Barcelona, which he and his spouse traded for this Miami enclave in 2021, dwelling in South Florida fits him. The Cuban influences right here remind him of the place he grew up, on the Canary Islands positioned off the northwest Africa coast. He prefers a quiet neighborhood like this to the overstimulating glitz of South Seashore — a becoming flip for a person whose producer nom de plume name-checks a chook of prey susceptible to nesting in the identical cozy spot for years. Miami’s proximity to Europe and different main U.S. cities for music, like New York and Los Angeles, doesn’t damage. However dwelling on this leafy surroundings has been a boon for the producer in different methods. “When you’ve one thing that’s expansive, massive, with a view… nicely, you begin to suppose greater,” says Díaz-Reixa, 40, whereas taking gradual pulls from a cup of black espresso and kicking again on an earth-toned modular sofa.
Had been it not for Díaz-Reixa mentioning in passing that he’s getting ready for studio periods later that day with a sure artist (he’s tight-lipped about whom), he looks like every other space dad puttering round in home slippers, stealing away moments inside the calls for of childcare to fiddle with songs on Ableton. The distinction is that Díaz-Reixa occurs to be a superproducer who steadily works alongside genre-defying and culture-shifting artists, together with Björk, Rosalía, FKA Twigs and Charli XCX, and left-field Latin pop musicians like Kali Uchis and Nicki Nicole.
A former indie musician with a proclivity for making “very modern, very freaky, very unusual” music, as he places it, within the mid- to late 2000s, Díaz-Reixa is now one among pop’s most in-demand producers, particularly amongst artists trying to take inventive dangers. Along with his ear for distinctly outré sounds, Díaz-Reixa’s unconventional manufacturing is catalyzing pop’s transformation into one thing extra amorphous and idiosyncratic. “I feel he is aware of how one can lead songs into a really distinctive place by juxtaposing exhausting and gentle sounds,” says Camila Cabello, who collaborated with Díaz-Reixa for each music on her 2024 album, C,XOXO. “Producers like him actually make my favourite pop music — daring and recent.”
Díaz-Reixa’s ethos for producing music, pop and in any other case, is knowledgeable as a lot by his open ears as it’s isolation. “I grew up with out a variety of sources,” he says. “So for me, my manner of listening to music was to make it myself.” Whereas coming of age in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, one of many archipelago’s two capitals, he listened to salsa, African music and different genres coalescing there on the time. His grandmother, a gifted pianist, taught him how one can learn music when he was a toddler, however she was hardly didactic about it. These classes unlocked one thing in him — as did his starvation to listen to extra of something, every little thing, since he didn’t readily have entry to high 40 radio or a bounty of document shops on the Canary Islands.
As an adolescent, he performed punk and hip-hop grooves on the drums, and round then he started experimenting with recording himself — primarily Neptunes-inspired beats he had whipped up and loops he made on cassettes. “I all the time had a variety of curiosity concerning the strategy of recording, with out figuring out what a producer or an engineer was,” he says. Nonetheless, he all the time knew that he wished to work in music in some capability. “I all the time had it tremendous clear,” he says. “I stated it, and folks would all the time snort at me on my island.”
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Finally Díaz-Reixa moved to Barcelona. Round then, he performed a solo gig as El Guincho at an underground Madrid membership — with a sampler, a mic and a flooring tom with an digital set off in tow — that modified his life. Younger Turks (now Younger)/XL Recordings, the tastemaking U.Okay. label group house to the likes of Radiohead and The xx, reached out to him on Myspace and signed him to a document deal shortly after, on the power of that exact present. He started touring the world, and in 2008, he launched his second album, Alegranza!, an avant-garde mélange of Tropicália, Afrobeats, looped vocals and different sounds.
Although he discovered a rising viewers, particularly in Australia, the US, the UK and Mexico, Díaz-Reixa felt like an outsider even inside the mid- to late-aughts heyday of ingenious indie-pop. “There wasn’t an area for me in that music, nor in hip-hop, due to the themes I touched on,” he says. “I talked about love, identification. So I used to be in a sort of limbo as an artist. They didn’t know the place to place me at festivals.”
In 2010, shortly after releasing his third album, Pop Negro, Díaz-Reixa bought a name from Icelandic musician Björk. She wished to work with him on her forthcoming album, Biophilia, so Díaz-Reixa made the trek to New York from Barcelona for the periods. Throughout that course of, Björk stated one thing that shocked him. “I do not forget that she instructed me, ‘You’re a producer.’ ” That didn’t completely sit proper with Díaz-Reixa, who remembers considering, “ ‘I’m an artist.’ ” Round then, his mom was identified with most cancers, and in 2012 — the identical 12 months he signed a publishing cope with Warner Chappell Music — he returned to the Canary Islands, the place he spent just a little over two years along with her till she died.
When Díaz-Reixa returned to Barcelona, and to music after pausing issues for a number of years, he began reevaluating his profession — and realized that Björk had been proper: He was meant to be a producer, not an artist. “In reality, what she stated made sense,” he says. “As a result of the half that I’ve most loved is making songs. I appreciated exhibits, the connection. However I feel my true calling is to spend as a lot time as attainable within the studio, and the least period of time attainable on the opposite duties as an artist: promotions, doing two interviews a day, touring.” After that, he put collectively a brand new album, Hiperasia, that he used to “discover my abilities as a producer and see who I used to be going to be as a producer,” he says. “I used that as a sort of college.”
A couple of years later, a musician he knew in Barcelona, Rosalía Vila Tobella, invited him to see her carry out at a flamenco bar, or tablao. She was singing requirements and accompanied by a guitarist, and he remembers being struck by the best way she commanded the small room, placing on the kind of present that wouldn’t be misplaced in an enormous stadium. However when Rosalía later reached out to Díaz-Reixa to collaborate, he at first demurred. “Clearly I noticed her as an amazing expertise, however I wasn’t positive the place I may assist,” he says. “She was very conventional in a method of music that I used to be very ignorant about. So for me it was like, ‘How do I situate myself right here?’ ” As soon as the 2 of them bought to know one another, although, they clicked and began informally making music collectively.
These meetups led to Díaz-Reixa ultimately serving to Rosalía co-write her staggeringly unique 2018 album, El Mal Querer, the whole lot of which he additionally produced. He declines to remark extra particularly on what he imparted in these periods, however following the success of the album — and the extra he stored producing — he realized that the isolation of his youth translated into a serious power within the studio, in that he appears to be like “in locations that almost all of individuals overlook,” he says. “I’m neither the most effective instrumentalist nor the most effective singer. However I do have that little factor that I’m realizing one thing that, later, will seem within the session.”
That sensibility comes by means of in how, say, he may recommend a Gucci Mane pattern for a Cabello music — which he did for the snippet that ended up undergirding the pop star’s “I LUV IT.” Or the best way he subverts conventional music construction. “I all the time search for the aspect of shock to reach very quickly in a music,” he says. “You don’t have to attend 40, 50 seconds till the hook.” Cabello, a fan of Díaz-Reixa’s work with Rosalía, says she discovered within the studio that Díaz-Reixa “provides that high quality of a bloodhound on the hunt for one thing magical, and he doesn’t accept something much less.”
Whereas he’s a fan of collaborating on full albums like El Mal Querer and C,XOXO, Díaz-Reixa nonetheless relishes working with artists on particular person songs. Not too long ago he collaborated with Charli XCX on “The whole lot is romantic,” a sweeping monitor from her album — and cultural phenomenon — brat. As Díaz-Reixa tells it, Charli already had brat’s marketing campaign rigorously outlined by the point that, about halfway by means of finishing the album, she got here to Miami for every week to document with him. Charli had a transparent thought about what she wished this explicit music to be: “She had been in Italy along with her companion, and he or she wished to replicate,” he says. “She had one thing written, simply lyrics.” He provides that she sought out a “grand” opening to the tune, and from there Díaz-Reixa swiftly assembled the piledriving beat at A2F Studios, the place “The whole lot is romantic” got here collectively, together with a number of different tracks that didn’t make the ultimate lower.
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Whatever the undertaking, Díaz-Reixa sees his job as a producer to fulfill artists the place they’re. “There are artists who’ve great imaginative and prescient, and great qualities to fulfill that imaginative and prescient, however they don’t have a solution to convert the imaginative and prescient into music,” he says. “Different artists have a variety of qualities as musicians, however they want a little bit of imaginative and prescient, or readability. As a producer — and any colleague of mine would inform you this — what we now have to do is simply pay attention.”
Díaz-Reixa’s sought-after manufacturing abilities, and his ongoing collaborations with boundary-pushing artists, are particularly important on condition that, for some time, he was a little bit of an trade oddball. He caught to his instincts for elevating music that was essential to him — reggaetón, African music and off-kilter digital music — for years, although it took some time for the world to meet up with him. “As in manufacturing, I made music that was sort of unusual, indie,” he says. “There wasn’t area for individuals making music in Spanish with all these influences. Then all of a sudden, fast-forward 10 years later, that’s mainstream. Out of the blue the world let its guard down and stated: ‘No, all of those types of music might be priceless, and they could be a a part of a two-and-a-half-minute music that enchants the world.’ ”
His endurance has paid off. Díaz-Reixa’s manufacturing work has nabbed him 5 Latin Grammys to date and an MTV Video Music Award for “Con Altura,” a collaboration between Rosalía and J Balvin. He’s serving to mentor the seven writer-producers signed to his label, Rico Publishing. He hasn’t but offered his manufacturing catalog — although he has been approached about it. “It doesn’t curiosity me,” he says. “It’s not one thing that I see, for now. Additionally, if you’re a dad, you see a future there, too,” he provides, explaining that perhaps his son may tackle managing the catalog in the future. Extra (secret) tasks are additionally in movement. However at this level, Díaz-Reixa insists there’s no explicit undertaking or award left on his bucket record.
“Actually, the best prize of creating music is to maintain making music,” he says. “My objective is far more artisanal: I really like the method, I like to make music, and I need to preserve dedicating myself to music — to be inside the thriller of music, and to reside inside that thriller.”
This text seems within the Oct. 5 situation of Billboard.
