Discoteca Flaming Star & El Arroyo Los Cagaos, DFS & El Arroyo Los Cagaos: Don´t Drink, Don´t Smoke – You must do Something (2008)

Discoteca Guitarrera Funkstorm , June 12th, 2004, Viandar de la Vera, Cáceres. Spain

“Discoteca Guitarrera Funkstorm” was an encounter between a performance group living off and in urban culture and experimenting with the memory of pop, and a rural group from the Spanish region of La Vera which investigates, without melancholy, the memory of the area’s folklore, rescuing pieces from and the spontaneous, irreverent style of traditional music.

Both sides work with concepts of memory, displacing it, activating it in the community experience of song. El Arroyo de los Cagaos, by confronting the filter of the previous dictatorship; Discoteca Flaming Star by investigating the replacing of folk music with pop rhetoric. Both projects share a consciousness of enjoyment as a tool for encounter and work.

On June 12th, 2004, Discoteca Flaming Star and El Arroyo de los Cagaos played – together, after one another, each to one another, for five hours in the square of Viandar de la Vera, Caceres, Spain – a village of 300 inhabitants. We wanted to test and challenge what it was that had brought us together:
The spirits of punk. The importance of texts. Simple, open musical structure that leaves room for spontanaiety and participation. AC/DC. An open spirit of collaboration. Irreverence. No fear of boredom. Emotional dependence on the environment. Not ruling out anything when creating .

“THAT STREAM THAT EXISTS WHICH NO-ONE REMEMBERS“

GLOSSARY AND THOUGHTS YEARS AFTER OUR SHOW IN THE TOWN SQUARE OF VIANDAR DE LA VERA [Cristina Gómez Barrio (Discoteca Flaming Star) and Cthuchi Zamarra (El Arroyo los Cagaos)].

Beyond the anecdotical, we’ve discovered the use of surprise as a form of creating feelings. The inhabitants of Viandar de la Vera and the surrounding areas welcomed us to their square with curiosity, perplexity, but also with a sense of complicity.

COMPLICITY: Very present in all traditional music (it digs down into the roots of identity)

We’ve discovered that we enjoy SINGING TOGETHER, whether we’re 100 or 2,000 kilometers apart. That we can act together without practising much, meaning we can improvise and also integrate arrhythmic and even out-of-tune interventions. We’ve discovered that as artists we depend on the emotional link with our immediate environment.

We continue to investigate traditional music freed from its conservative charge.
We continue to investigate forms of cultural expression freed from industrial homogenization.
We continue not to use hierarchical structures.
We continue to search for consensus within the group in all we do.
We continue to activate a multi-directional communicative process.
We continue to do what others have done before us.

old music – new music

Our TOOLS: SONGS, guitars, guitarrillos*, untuned electric bass, voices, mandolins, violins, flutes, mortars, the song lyrics, the bottle, banging defiantly on jugs, the passacaglia, electric guitars, feathers, make-up, long hair, repetition, text, glasses of wine, antimilitary activism, drawings.

SONGS: a form of oral memory, a link with the past that gathers aspects of life written
memory passes by. A personal response to historical, political and social facts.
There are SONGS we don’t completely understand and songs that industry insists don’t
belong to us but which belong to us in spite of it. We insist on making use of them.

SO MANY SEXUALITIES – SO MANY SATIRES – SO MUCH FREEDOM

We insist on the resistance of the text.
We insist on the existence of references that give us strength.
We insist on the desire for enjoyment.
We insist on looking around us.
We insist on singing, dancing, drawing.
We insist on listening.
We insist on participating and letting everyone else participate.

* Small guitar similar to a mandolin.