The fact that Latin House/Latin EDM/Latin Electro exist as genres was news to me; I mean I assumed but; and the tip-of-the-iceberg research I recently did into these genres made clear that what I created does not fit with any of the above. But for playlisting and key-word search-tagging, and for the life of me, I don’t know what else to call this music. I did also stumble across a playlist called ‘Electropical’ which I thought was quite on the nose.

It began as an etude. I just wanted to see if I could make something that sounded “latiny.” Going in, all I knew was that were some rhythmic rules I would have to learn to achieve the sound I was after, but the tonality/harmony side of things remained somewhat more elusive.

So, I did what any 21st century person does when they want to learn a new skill, I youtubed it. I will struggle to lay out what I learnt in text format, partly because I’ve far from mastered it, and partly because it’s not that interesting unless physically executed.

Once I had a grasp on the rudiments of latin rhythm, there seemed to be a lot of scope for what I was able to do harmonically. There did not appear to be much regulation around it. I did not exploit this opportunity as much as I could have. It was my first go.

I opted for a simple Phrygian chord pattern, the kind that a lot of Mariachi music makes use of (I think I know what this is because of what I’ve heard in films). I hoped, if I really pinpointed my chord progression to central/southern America, I would not be accused of “not being latin,” which however, I feel I am incredibly guilty of. Then I did something I never do. I left it there. Never before have I created a piece of music that so brazenly repeats itself for as long as this piece of music was going to. Later I felt remorse and added the bridge, which has a real salsa feel to it, I think at one point the saved project in my DAW was named ‘Les Club Tropicales, Now with Added Salsa’.

From here I had to make a choice. Obviously, I was aware of the long-standing history of Latin music which is as rich and as saturated as any musical folk tradition. I had to avoid submitting a whisper to a room full of shouts. The way I would do this would be to bend/fuse genres and opt for atypical instrumentation. I had to keep some classics as I felt the more I strayed from tradition, the more I would lose what I had set out to create, so there was a balance to strike. What I ended up with is a sort of traditional latin rhythm-section supporting some synth lead, bass and arp. It’s drum heavy with 808s battling traditional mambo percussion and synth bass fighting upright bass for listeners attention, and salsa piano bridged with cascading tango synth runs straddling the line between a meringue dance recital and an EDM breakdown, or something; Dancing about architecture is like tyring to music about writing.

So anyways, when the song was nearing completion, I started to think about its context and what it meant and what it would be called etc. I had a note saved on my phone which simply read ‘jardines tropical’. And I was like “I really want this to be the title of a song”. The aesthetic the song brought up for me was inauthenticity. Because it was so clearly lacking in its attempts to “be latin” it made me think of like Irish pubs in Spain, or walled resorts in difficult places in south America, where the interior, not only doesn’t reflect the exterior at all, but fails to be what it thinks it is in the first place. The song looked like a disused swimming pool, or a cheap clay-souvenir stall in a tiny shop down an alleyway in Chania. It looks, sounds and smells like the real thing, but there’s an uncanny quality that suggests it doesn’t represent what it claims to, at all. This is the MIDI programmed, digitally synthesized piano, sampled percussion and ARP pretending to ambass the old country. I thought this was a beautiful concept and actually, something you see everywhere you go. A thousand pubs in any one region claiming to be the oldest pub in [insert your country here] Come in and try our local delicacy which none of the locals would ever dare touch.

Then came naming the track, I wanted it to have a cutesy, neatly tied up little name that represented what it “claimed it was”, something the marketing partners would sign off on. Something like Coco Cabana. I went back to the note in my phone ‘jardines tropical’ – Tropical Garden. It definitely had the right feel, it promised what the song was definitely not going to deliver. The finishing touch was to include a spelling mistake. I ended up with Les Club Tropicales, which is a poor translation between French and Spanish with a butchered plural, of the Tropical Club. The Tropical Club has a modesty to it, promises little grandeur and is a clumsy, cumbersome sounding thing. Pluralise the wrong word and you get The Tropicals Club. How beautifully incorrect that sounds. But translate it badly and you get Les Club Tropicales. To someone like myself who only speaks one language, it sounds like it has just enough prestige to perfectly let me down. When I read the title I feel like a yank who has never been to Ireland walking into an Irish pub and thinking this is what it might really be like there.

From there it sort of transformed in my imagination as this actual place – Les Club Tropicales. Welcome to the most inauthentic experience available in your resort. Come and experience insincere and foreign beverages in a venue whose theme doesn’t remotely resemble its location, even slightly, and this is the soundtrack. But more than that, it became a fictional place that only exist in the imagination, like Oz, you had to go over the rainbow to get to it; Les Club Tropicales you have to go underwater to locate this sunken cantina, tropical jungle-speakeasy, hence the scuba noises, so imagine just the worst Atlantis ever.