NGUZUNGUZU - The Perfect Lullaby by DISmagazine
"If you want an example of the wide-ranging nature of dance music in 2011, look no further than Nguzunguzu, the Los Angeles production and DJ team of Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda. The duo, which got some attention hosting the popular (and now-dormant) Wildness party series at the L.A. club Silver Platter, incorporates most every strain of domestic and global music into its beats-- from Chicago juke and footwork to UK bass, mambo, reggaeton, and cumbia. But they also celebrate the familiar: For all the exotic sounds in an Nguzunguzu track, there are usually elements of chart hip-hop and R&B offsetting them.
Nguzunguzu have two EPs to their name-- Mirage and a self-titled one, both from 2010-- but the best introduction to their sound is The Perfect Lullaby, an album-length mixtape made for the online art magazine DIS. (It's available for a free download here.) On this, Pineda and Maroof (it's worth mentioning that the latter recently served as M.I.A.'s tour DJ) build a bouncy, dreamy mix that takes specific inspiration from the Angolan dance genres of Kizomba and Zouk. These styles are generally slow and seductive and have a grimy, percussive undercurrent, and Nguzunguzu match that with the similarly sultry vocals of artists like Brandy and The-Dream. The combination is pretty ingenious.
A big part of the reason the mix works so well is simple execution-- Nguzunguzu blend these far-flung sounds together in a way that just feels natural. They often leave source material intact (vocals are rarely tweaked or mutated, as they are in some recent indie-leaning R&B), so it's less about intricate remixing than careful beat matching. For example, early in the set (it's not divided into individual tracks), they put R. Kelly's verse from Ja Rule's "Wonderful" over a Zouk instrumental by DJ P&P Productions that flips the context of the source but maintains something essential about it, too. The same goes for Amerie's classic "1 Thing", set here to a grimy beat by France's DJ Lo, placing the original's high-energy clamor on a humid slow boil.
In a recent interview with DJ /rupture on his WFMU show, Mudd Up!, Maroof talked about a Nguzunguzu track combining a Wiley instrumental with the Nicki Minaj remix of Drake's "Best I Ever Had", saying, "She kind of raps like a grime MC on it... I want her to be a grime MC, so I just kind of put the two together." A simple statement, but it gets at what the group does so well-- sort of a wide-eyed, creative reshuffling of au courant music. So even with the R&B bent of this mix, the group seems more in line with folks like DJ /rupture and even M.I.A. than the crop of urban-pop revisionists that has sprung up recently. But for Nguzunguzu, it's not about politics-- these two are just trying to build the global discotheque of their dreams." (Joe Colly - Pitchfork)
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