Bajofondo

Historical background

Bajofondo is an Argentine-Uruguayan collective whose project was shaped by Gustavo Santaolalla and Juan Campodónico before they recruited its musicians; María Mercedes Liska describes Santaolalla as the ensemble's ideologue. The first record, Bajofondo Tango Club, appeared in November 2002 and earned the group a Latin Grammy for best instrumental pop album. The name later dropped its "Tango Club" and the collective allowed itself other musics. Mar Dulce followed in 2007 - the arrival of drummer Adrián Sosa turning the project into a full band, with guests Elvis Costello, Julieta Venegas and Nelly Furtado - then Presente in March 2013.

Liska places electronic tango outside of fusion: its sonority rests on the juxtaposition of dissimilar elements, an intertextual arrangement built on quotation and the constant recycling of sounds that call upon cultural memory and history. She notes that those who created these projects do not come from the world of tango, but are Argentines living abroad or in close contact with British, American, German or French musical trends. The group would abandon the "tango electrónico" label to call itself "contemporary rioplatense music", to no effect whatsoever: its records went on filling the commercial electronic tango bin. In 2007, the City of Buenos Aires' Undersecretariat for Cultural Industries observed that Gotan Project and Bajofondo were practically the only segment of formal tango record sales to the local public.

Source: María Mercedes Liska, "Las transgresiones del tango electrónico: condiciones sociales contemporáneas y valoraciones estéticas en los bordes del tango," Revista Musical Chilena, año LXX, no. 225, January-June 2016, pp. 50-72, https://www.scielo.cl/pdf/rmusic/v70n225/art02.pdf ; Mauro Apicella, "¿Qué pasó con el tango electrónico?," La Nación, 2 September 2018, https://www.lanacion.com.ar/espectaculos/que-paso-tango-electronico-de-expansion-sin-nid2167941/ (accessed 31 July 2026).