Ernest Gonzalez has made a techno track that doesn’t have a beat so much as it has a pulse — a thick, droning throb that slowly and steadily disrupts the dense white noise that is its overwhelming presence. Most club-music beats are either overlays that set a grid atop the many elements of an individual track, or they are under-girding, setting a foundation for everything that is built upon them. Here the beats are more like hard objects pushing through a dense fabric, their impact muffled yet persistent. “ChupaCabra,” as the track is titled, by Mexicans with Guns (aka Gonzalez), opens with a deliriously slo-motion robot dub. It’s all swagger, albeit of a mechanical, almost robotic variety, and it proceeds at a pace that seems to slow everything within view for the duration of its playing time.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mexicanswithguns. More on Gonzalez at mexicanswithguns.com. Brief interview with him at npr.org.