AAAA^mx

© YNOT

Gabo Barranco, also known as AAAA, is a Mexican electronic music producer and performer with an “out-of-the-box” approach. Driven by analogue hardware, Barranco creates intense music that varies from melancholic melodious ambient to undeniably heavy acid assaults. Speculation, technology and sonic fiction play crucial roles in his work.
From the 1980s to the 1990s, within the Black and Latino community, the digital and analog technology of sequencers, synths, samplers and software began to challenge the ability to pigeonhole identity, and consequently, to racialize music. Listeners could no longer assume musicians’ racial identity; synthesis and machines allowed for a universal sound language accessible to all. For artists, a new dimension emerged, where it was possible to create sonic fictions; where cultural fantasies and deconstructed discourses could be used to craft powerful competing futures that combat White European and American hegemony.
This sonic fantasy, the context in which it is experienced, and the use of machines has influenced Barranco since he started studying audio engineering and music theory. It has fostered a sonic fiction where colonized peoples of the Americas (“mestizos”) possess a type of cyborg consciousness; an oppositional awareness that can provide the leads for survival and resistance under first world capitalist cultural environments.
Barranco has performed at numerous international music events and his music has been released by cutting-edge record labels, such as Omnidisc (Miami) and Acid Test (Berlin). He has also collaborated with die-hard heads such as Tin Man; OST composers such as Johan Carøe; and visual artists such as Itaru Yasuda.