Gotan Project featuring Osvaldo Pugliese and … Kruder & Dorfmeister

Electro meets tango and both survive!

This is the fourth article of five about the cover version of Frank Zappa‘s Chunga’s Revenge by the electro tango group Gotan Project. The full series is listed here, but you don’t have to read all the previous posts to enjoy this one.

The thread running through the series is woven from the music and careers of the artists behind the numerous name-checks in the lyrics which Gotan Project added to Zappa‘s original instrumental. Artists from such different musical worlds that you wouldn’t normally think of mentioning them in the same breath.

When I first started writing about the song, I saw it as simply my pretext for talking tango to people who may not know tango, and talking about other musical styles to people who are only mad for tango. Working on each post, however, I have not only discovered artists I previously knew little or nothing about, but also uncovered some unexpected musical connections between them.

Today’s post looks at why Gotan Project link up Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister, two electro DJs from Vienna, with tango legend Osvaldo Pugliese from Buenos Aires. It happens in line 3 of verse 2 of Chunga’s Revenge when the husky voice of Argentinian soul-funk guitarist Willy Crook, half-speaking, half-whispering, says :

Kruder, Dorfmeister, Pugliese

An unusual trio, to say the least. Kruder & Dorfmeister released their first album in 1995, the year Osvaldo Pugliese died. The trio never collaborated. The studio photo here is fictional.

But this series is about accepting that if Gotan Project put names together, then there must be a connection. So what could these three possibly have in common? I would say that the music they play is characterised by a rhythmic and emotional narrative which are immediately recognisable as being theirs. And that is the idea I wish to explore here.

Where shall we begin? One of Pugliese‘s classic highly danceable tangos was his version of Seguime si podés (Follow me if you can) from 1953. That may sound like an invitation to tango, but we’ll tango later. Please follow me, if you will, into a little electro.

Kruder & Dormeister – rhythm doesn’t drive, it invites you

Kruder & Dorfmeister take their rhythmic recipe from trip-hop and downbeat, two styles of electronic music designed for a purpose : to create an aural public space for clubbers to chill and relax as they wind down from more energetic rhythms during a night out; to share an aural private space to accompany people who want some quiet time away from the frenzy of daily life.¹ Have a listen to their famous The Jazz Sessions from 1998 to experience the sort of atmosphere they create. It was their second album which got good reviews, but also created debate.

Apart from tagging it as trip-hop or downbeat, how do we describe their music? Fortunately, Kruder & Dorfmeister give their own answer in the opening spoken voice track from a recent concert in Vienna :

Some music is made for movement, rushing, pulsing, building for the next thing. Never staying still long enough to hear what silence has to say. There is a kind of music that slows down the clock without stopping it. There is a kind of music where every sound has space to exist, to echo, to drift. Where rhythm doesn’t drive. It invites you …

It’s true that the music of Chunga’s Revenge by Gotan Project is emotionally cool and rhythmically non-aggressive to listen to. Dipping into Kruder & Dorfmeister‘s words to describe it, we could also say that Gotan’s cover of Zappa‘s original slows down the clock without stopping it, giving every sound space to exist, helped in particular by the artful musicianship of bandoneon-player Nini Flores and violinist Line Kruse, with a sprinkling of inspiration from the Jamaican dub sounds à la Mad Professor.

Recorded 25 years ago, Chunga’s Revenge still feels contemporary and soothing. Let’s try a dig a little deeper and wonder where the modern idea of soothing music comes from.

Try a little something contemporary and soothing

The downbeat style which Kruder & Dorfmeister announce in their concert presentation is also a distant cousin of the music designed to soothe tense situations known as muzak. No hasty conclusions here. The term muzak may be notoriously used today to condemn sad, boring music, but it didn’t start out that way.

The concept of muzak was originally born from an invention by the American George Owen Squier who found a way to deliver music via an electrical telephone wire at a time when playing records or broadcasting from radio required complicated equipment. He was no club DJ, more of a technician with a flair for business. In 1922, Squier managed to sell one of his patents for this process to the creators of Wired Radio Inc., a company which he also invested in and helped to develop. Wire Radio‘s innovative transmission service made music potentially available to paying American customers anywhere they could install a telephone.

By 1934, however, real radio was beginning to become so popular and accessible in the USA that  wire radio lost its attraction. Ever the businessman, Squier decided that the content of this service needed a new name and a new image and invented the term Muzak – a trademark which he came up with by combining the words Music and Kodak. ² Unfortunately, Squier also died in 1934 so he was unable to do take his idea much further.

In 1937, Wire Radio Inc. was bought by William Benton at Warner Brothers who took a cool look at the cost of muzak and saw that copyright payments weighed heavily in the company’s budget. The solution meant investing in specific content : tailor-made muzak content of original smoothed out jazz and classical recordings for broadcast via the service recorded by an in-house orchestra conducted by Ben Selvin who made 7,000 recordings in 10 years – and Muzak had no royalties to pay. And miraculously, in the Golden Age of Radio, muzak became a big success and was piped to more and more public spaces.

Time passed and, by the time America reached the 1950s, the makers of muzak turned it into something else again, creating easy listening on records you could buy and play at home. They realised that this constant supply of non-aggressive music could be used to deliberately influence people’s behaviour in the whole range of social situations : muzak could help people relax while waiting for a medical appointment or for a flight at an airport, muzak could give people a sense of well-being so they would spend more time and money in shops and restaurants, and the pace and style of muzak could be customised and broadcast to people in the workplace in order to regulate productivity. And when everybody went home, what better choice than to relax and recover to something from the easy listening section until it was time to get up and go to work again ?

As a result, when the1960s had rolled on to a cultural soundtrack made mainly of pop and rock music in all shapes and sizes, muzak came to be seen not only as manipulative, it also became the generic term for any dull, colourless music of no artistic value created to fill silence in public spaces. People referred to it casually as elevator music.

Music with a chameleon quality

But it wasn’t all bad news. A British musician, Brian Eno, who was actually listening to all this, was fascinated by the minimal musical landscape he found. He embraced the style, developed it, invented the term ambient music and, in 1978, released the provocatively-titled Music for airports.

Here was music which seemed to abandon melody completely in favour of resonance. The liner notes to the Music for airports album couldn’t be clearer : Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. It must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular. It must be as ignorable as it is interesting. ³

Now let me ask you a question : Where did you first hear Gotan Project‘s debut album? The chances are that it was in the background of some public space or during a listening experience you had while doing something else. So you were neither looking for it nor expecting it. Gotan Project simply crept up on you. Maybe it wasn’t exactly muzak, but it had a chameleon quality which was always a key-ingredient to its success : you noticed it once you were already listening.

Listen for a moment to Trip De Luxe, Peter Kruder‘s remix of Triptico, an early Gotan Project track. The Gotan original Triptico has a fine range of emotions and instruments whereas, in the remix, Kruder chooses something altogether different : music with very little melody, built on layers of breathy machine rhythms which rise and fall but somehow let you carry on with whatever you are doing.

Coming from the ambient end of electronic music scale, the aesthetic influence from Kruder & Dorfmeister‘s acknowledged by Gotan Project may just be what made it possible to slip their version of electro tango discreetly into any environment – whether it was for dancing to, or shopping to, it was music which didn’t drive, music which invited.

Okay, time to tango. So how does all this compare to the music of Osvaldo Pugliese?

Osvaldo Pugliese and the Tango Machine

You are unlikely to come across Pugliese‘s music while out shopping or chilling over a cocktail. Not because he plays tango – after all, you could imagine hearing Astor Piazzolla in all sorts of places, even if it’s simply Grace Jones singing I’ve seen that face before⁴ – but because Pugliese‘s tango is rhythmically driven and has an emotional intensity which demands your attention.

In spite of his thin build, small stature and wisp of a voice, everybody heard Osvaldo Pugliese the day⁵ he mentioned la Maquina Tanguera – the Tango Machine. Speaking of his orchestra, he declared : Nosotros somos un poroto de la máquina tanguera. This literally translates as : We are a bean in the tango machine. People often remember this as meaning that he saw his orchestra as the Tango Machine but, if you look again, he is actually pointing out that this great orchestra is simply a small part of something even bigger, which is tango itself. It’s time to say more about this unusual man named as an influence by Gotan Project alongside Kruder & Dorfmeister.

December 2nd 2025 was Osvaldo Pugliese‘s 120th birthday and, although he wasn’t there to celebrate it, the music recorded by the orchestra he directed for 55 years certainly resonated on tango dance floors the world over.

His personal journey was not only musical. It was also marked by a commitment to the political left, numerous arrests and stays in prison. In the mid-1930s, he was one of the leading voices fighting to obtain the right for tango musicians to form the first trade union and elect representatives, something which was not to everybody’s taste. During the succession of militarised political regimes which governed Argentina until 1983, this influential tango figure, who was also openly a member of the Communist Party, was imprisoned as an example to less famous political opponents of what they could expect if they caused trouble.

But Pugliese never abandoned tango, and both his fans and musicians publicly supported him through thick and thin.

Pugliese was both a great organiser and a man of principle who did things his way. The Pugliese orchestra bore his name, but, unlike other orchestra leaders, he made sure he was paid the same salary as his musicians and that they worked together as a cooperative where individual creativity was developed to make the collective unit stronger. This meant that, although he was a highly innovative composer, Pugliese nurtured talents within the orchestra, putting his musicians in the spotlight with their arrangements and compositions which enriched and diversified the repertoire they played.

The rhythm and the riff of the arrastre

What about the music ? To enter Pugliese‘s style of tango, a good place to start is by listening the trilogy of his own instrumental compositions which took the genre to new places in the 1940s with La Yumba, Negracha and Malandraca. Listen to any one of these three pieces and see what you remember. Chances are that it won’t necessarily be the melody or the tune so much as the rhythm and the riff.

The trademark which makes Pugliese instantly recognisable for dancers is the arrastre, a technique for marking the strong beat by leading into it with a rhythmic whoosh. As the English-language version of the Todo Tango page on listening to to tango dance music explains, the two-syllable word – invented by Pugliese – Yumba is itself an example of an arrastre at work : The repeated cell of two strong arrastres (‘yum’) on beats 1 and 3, separated by a less powerful chord on beats 2 and 4 (‘ba’), is supported by the double bass powerfully striking the strings with the bow. Listen for yourself to this extract.

This isn’t downbeat music which you play when you want to cool down. Pugliese‘s tango is music to move to. It is rarely played early by DJs on their evening playlists. It requires attention if the dancers are to explore its depths because, along with the arrastre, there is an emotional narrative to each piece brought by the dialogue between violins and bandoneons which lights the way to the unique path created by each couple on the dancefloor.

If you are not a tango dancer, that may be difficult to grasp. Let me try and put it differently by reconnecting with Kruder & Dorfmeister for a moment. Listen to Chacabuqueando, a tango composed by lead bandoneon Roberto Alvarez in the Pugliese orchestra and first recorded in 1982. I am tempted to describe Osvaldo Pugliese‘s music using Kruder & Dorfmeister‘s words rearranged : When I listen to Chacabuqueando, I hear music where every sound has space to exist … music that slows down the clock without stopping it … staying still long enough to hear what silence has to say … then pulsing, building for the next thing … where rhythm doesn’t drive… it invites you …

Pieces like Chacabuqueando, and there are many of them in the Pugliese discography, create moments which can worm their way into your musical memory and remain long after the music is over. Tango dancers hear these pieces many times over the years, recognising them as Pugliese without always knowing the title, and tell stories of going home after a tango evening and hearing passages from tunes to which they danced which keep playing in their heads as they try, in vain, to go to sleep. They themselves become a bean in the tango machine.

Pugliese also helped Gotan Project to the tango dancefloor

Certain musical colours taken from the palette of electro artists like Kruder & Dorfmeister gave Gotan Project the chameleon quality which was an essential ingredient in the international success of the group’s debut album. But the key to the tango dancefloor would have other sources, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where DJs  – myself among them – only played traditional tango, waltz and milonga tracks, because that was basically what was available.

At various breaks in an evening there would be musical transitions of 2 or 3 lighter, alternative dance styles including 50s rock n roll, swing or salsa, before going back to tango. Apart from that, I remember seeing a young couple give an exhibition dance during a tango evening to trip-hop maestros Portishead‘s Glory Box, which was mesmerising – it was like they were speaking a familiar language in a new context. But that was a show, which we watched and applauded. Playing that for everyone to dance to might well have created a sense of unease, causing people who were expecting tango to stop before the end – nobody wanted that.

But as we know, the mix-masters of Gotan Project always manage to find a way in. And the rhythm and riff of Osvaldo Pugliese would help here. Not surprisingly, Gotan Project tried to electronically reproduce the pulsation from Don Osvaldo‘s repertoire in Santa Maria (Del Buen Ayre), a track which, like Chunga’s Revenge, appears on the group’s debut album. Listen closely and it doesn’t have the authentic arrastre of the whole orchestra, but there was something sufficiently familiar for tango dancers to slowly begin to accept Gotan Project on the playlist for those musical transitions during an evening. The group also sampled the riff from the Pugliese version of the tango Gallo Ciego, from 1959, on the song Peligro which appears on Gotan Project‘s Tango 3.0 released in 2011 – again, something familiar to find acceptance.

As you can see, the hybrid musicians of Gotan Project from the world of drum machines, electro dancefloors and night-clubbers were not just name-dropping when they mentioned Pugliese, they were paying tribute to a figure from traditional tango who they truly respected. And putting him in the mix.

Still want more?

There are currently three other posts on my blog using Chunga’s Revenge as a starting point : Meet & greet with Gotan Project looks more closely at the Gotan band-members ; Gotan Project mix Piazzolla, Troilo and Xavier Cugat investigates the careers behind these three names who figure about the group’s musical influences; Zappa remixed by Gotan Project explores the influence exerted by jazz-rock genius Frank Zappa and dub-master Mad Professor on the Gotan sound. There is one final post in the making which, if you count this one on Osvaldo Pugliese and Kruder & Dorfmeister, will bring the total to five.

There’s a chance to hear more Gotan Project on their YouTube Channel.

Notes

1. Trip hop : The Evolution from The Underground provides and introduction to these styles with examples of artists and playlists for you to explore. ↩︎
2. Kodak is the name of the photographic company created in 1888. According to an advert from 1920 quoted by Wikipedia, the name “was simply invented – made up from letters of the alphabet to meet our trademark requirements. It was short and euphonious and likely to stick in the public mind.” Squier took that made-up name a step further and used it to name Muzak. ↩︎
3. From article on udiscovermusic.com. ↩︎
4. The song adds lyrics to Piazzolla‘s famous Libertango. There’s more on his universal appeal and his connection to Gotan Project here. ↩︎
5. He was asked to say a few words by way of introduction for a legendary concert given by la Orquesta Tipica Osvaldo Pugliese at the Teatro Colon of Buenos Aires in December 1985. Celebrating Pugliese‘s 80th birthday, the event was both filmed and recorded. ↩︎