When you’re a pioneer in electronic music like Rob Garza, you go as you please.
That can be Carmen de Playa, Mexico, or Durango – whatever floats your boat. When you’re on top, you play where your heart desires.
The DJ and one-half of Thievery Corporation, spoke with The Durango Herald on Wednesday while on his tropical vacation in Mexico about his solo show tonight at Animas City Theatre.
“I jumped at the opportunity,” Garza said. “It’s great to travel around there because the mentality is very open, and it’s a beautiful part of the country.”
His earliest memories of electronic dance music were of creating it, not listening, he said. Garza’s middle school in Connecticut offered a class in electronic music, and that’s what led him to his love of dub and bossa nova.
At about age 13 in 1983, he started making his own beats. Since then, he has gained a worldwide audience and has worked and performed with some of the best in the music, and history, including opening for Paul McCartney with Thievery in 2009.
Electronic dance music (EDM) is enjoying its best years yet since it became a genre about 30 years ago. When Garza was starting, it wasn’t much of a scene compared to now. It took awhile, but now, Garza and his Thievery partner, Eric Hilton, are riding a wave of popularity that they helped start after they met in 1995 in Washington, D.C., and on their own. They don’t answer to a powerful record label. They do it themselves under their own ESL Music.
“You can get a lot of frequencies that you can’t get out of electronic guitar or standard drumset. We’ve heard those for the past 50 years, and now people are responding to bass frequencies that you were never able to listen to the way you can now,” Garza said.
Thievery released the album “Saudade” on April 1. The Brazilian sounds on the new album are a return to the genre that brought the duo together in the mid-’90s. There are five female vocalists, including their muse LouLou Ghelichkhani, who shines on the album. They sing in more than one language, including French and Portuguese.
“Saudade” is a Portuguese word that means “something, or someone that is lost” or simply, “the presence of absence.”
Garza’s sidekick Hilton will be absent tonight, and so will the myriad performers who round out Thievery’s usual stage sets. It’ll just be Garza and his own music he has composed, which is a “lot different” than his day-job stuff.
When he isn’t working on Thievery material, he’s taking care of his family and honing his DJ skills in San Francisco, where he’s based. His latest release, “Calle del Espiritu Santo,” a collaboration with Neighbour, came out in October 2013.
It’s more focused on deep house, nu-disco beats, not political and more concentrated on influencing people to let loose on the dance floor.
“They’re in for a nice surprise,” Garza said.
mhayden@durangoherald.com
If you go
Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation, along with Ramona and Posh Josh, will play at 10 p.m. today at Animas City Theatre, 128 W. College Drive, $25-$30, 799-2281, www.animascitytheatre.com.
