Ford:Proco: Diagrama Percutor
At-At Records

Hailing from Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, electronic producers Roberto Castañeda and Lauro Saavedra serve up forty-three minutes of space-age electro-lounge music on their latest Ford:Proco album Diagrama Percutor. Saavedra and Castañeda certainly know their way around a sampler, given that they've been group members since 1987 and 1991, respectively. The album's tracks pitter-patter in at times an unassuming and low-key manner (e.g., “Sleep” ) but not so much that their music's charm goes unnoticed, and the music sometimes suggests that duo's synth-based pop wouldn't sound out of place on Audio Dregs, given the sonic affinities between Ford:Proco and AD artists like Lineland and Dim Dim.

The forty-three-minute album starts promisingly with four minutes of poppy, space-age electro-funk (“Capicua”), and then proceeds to generally make good on that promise in the seven cuts that follow. “Polare Es El Circulo” works up some serious steam with a jaunty mix of acoustic guitars, drum machine beats, and burbling electronics. An industrial-strength rawness cloaks the writhing electronic mass that sputters and marches through “La Torre Y El Diablo,” while a tech-house pulse lends the shape-shifting track strong propulsion. Traces of Kraftwerk crop up in the shiny synthetics and rhythm patterning of “Irrompible” but the track's got a grimier side too which comes out in the rough-house funk pulse that slams through its second half. That Kraftwerk influence also surfaces in the brooding electro-funk of “Kursk,” its title a presumed reference to the nuclear cruise missile submarine of the Russian Navy that sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. At nine minutes, “Universal Flux” offers listeners the most complete presentation of the Ford:Proco sound. Powered by a head-nodding electro-funk groove, the track finds the duo cruising through the upper galaxies with nary a care in the world and occasionally slowing to take in the shooting stars outside the space capsule. Like much of the album, “Universal Flux” sounds like m usic tailor-made for a Neptune-based bachelor pad.

August 2009