“Cuentito,” a single from Tone Ranger (Alex Simon) collaborating with Vecinoz (Tati Bohorquez and Giovan Michael), shimmers like heat rising off desert sand. It’s Latin-Pop, but with an insistent pulse that makes you want to move, even if you’re sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. I wonder, are dentist waiting rooms a type of desert? They certainly feel that way sometimes.
The lyrics, drawing inspiration from Lorca and Borges, don’t follow a straight path. They are fragments, almost overheard conversations, that somehow weave into a cohesive whole. New Mexico, their chosen backdrop, seems less like a location and more like a feeling; vibrant, sun-drenched, and ancient. You can almost taste the red chile and feel the dry breeze, I think, perhaps I’m just hungry now.
It’s odd how a piece of music can connect seemingly disparate threads – literature, landscape, dance – and present them as something new. A bit like trying to describe the colour blue to a person who can only see red. I suppose that makes music… magic? It certainly makes this collaboration intriguing.
There’s a satisfying kind of rhythmic friction at play here, a push and pull between the structured electronic soundscapes of Tone Ranger and the emotive vocal delivery of Vecinoz. It’s the sort of thing that makes you think about all the improbable things that had to happen for this specific collaboration to come into being. That makes you think about all things happening in any moment, really.
“Cuentito” isn’t a story as much as a series of impressions. Like snapshots of a dream, fleeting yet powerful, its meaning lies as much in the spaces between the notes as in the notes themselves. A brief, shimmering encounter.
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