In his feature about El Guincho in FADER 54, Jace Clayton (aka fellow collage artist DJ /Rupture) outlined their shared nerd-out:
After 15 minutes shooting the shit about Dilla and Guinean label Sylliphone and how focused Dr Dre was when NWA first dropped, I’m outclassed when he starts talking about Frank Sinatra’s use of spring reverb. The conversation drifts from Milton Nascimiento (Zeus in El Guincho’s Pantheon) to calypso king Mighty Sparrow, and he says, “When I started producing, I was obsessed with exotica records.” It’s odd to meet a musician so energetic about other people’s music. Some can’t do it even when you specifically ask them too, but El Guincho’s a guy who big ups Martin Denny’s use of panning right before sharing this thoughts on Trinidadian harmonies, a guy who remembers where the cymbals were placed on that Bowie record.
El Guincho and Prins Thomas both have similarly varied tastes and keen ears, and the ability to reap a cross-section of sounds and house them under one rainbow. For his remix of "Antillas," now available on 12-inch, Prins Thomas does not scamper far from the source, simply chopping and extending much of El Guincho's vocal and removing and then teasing the original's main melody, abstracting many of the song's ancestral samples. It's a cut up job, but more a sidestep and extension than a progression or regression.
Stream: El Guincho, "Antillas (Prins Thomas Remix)"
