Memo Pimiento lives opposite a park in Brussels. Some days he goes over and sits there, and from somewhere behind him comes Turkish music, from a man nearby who is listening to it. Moments like that, in a city where his neighbours come from all over the world, feed straight into his work. And his music can travel back to the people it came from. “One time, playing a gig here, a Turkish guy came to tell me that my sound was like a Turkish band I had never heard before.”
Memo and Manon met in Mexico and lived there for three years before moving to Europe. Back then they played electroclash and dark wave as Zorroz, and when they settled in Brussels they planned to carry on in the same vein. The city had other ideas. “There were a lot of bands here already, and some of the bookers kept asking me why I don’t play cumbia.” He already had, more than once. “I had a cumbia band in Mexico, and another project, Pimiento Pastel, that mixed cumbia with jazz and funk.” In the end he gave the bookers the answer they were after. “So I said, okay, they’re right. I’m Latin. For me, it’s very natural to play this kind of rhythm.”
That answer became the current project, launched in 2016. “I mixed it with the ideas I had at that moment, from electronic and rock music.” The timing was good, as Europe was starting to pay attention to the style. At Fusion Festival in Germany he even watched Celso Piña, the accordion star from Monterrey he had grown up knowing, play to a German crowd. “It was very strange for me to watch Celso Piña in Germany.”
Back home, the music took longer to land. “The first time I played this project in Mexico, people told me, ‘But you don’t play cumbia. You play electronic music, or space cumbia.’” A single night changed their minds. “One time, at a New Year’s Eve party, all the people went crazy for the music. It was a real pleasure to watch my compatriots dancing to music that was so strange to them.” Every trip since has built on that night, and the wider scene has moved with him. “Now bands like Meridian Brothers or Frente Cumbiero tour Mexico often. In 2016, I think they weren’t very well known there.”
In the studio, everything starts from cumbia. “It’s music I’ve listened to since I was a child. It’s the base, and I always start with it.” What goes on top comes from further afield. “I really like working with oriental scales and the very groovy rhythm of cumbia. I think the match is beautiful.” Electronic tools then “make it more interesting, more sophisticated”, with echo and reverb doing much of the work, and in Manchester he realised how much he shares on that front with a band from the city. “When I was in Manchester, I found the first Stone Roses album and started listening to it again.” He heard the connection straight away. “I work a lot with echo and reverb, like them, in a very analogue way.”
Inside the duo, the roles are clear. “I do all the sound, and Manon does all the visuals.” Manon is also a photographer and directs the duo’s videos, and the two sides feed each other. “In many tracks we work on the visual part and the sound part together, and the visuals influence the sound.” The lyrics travel between them. “I write something and she rewrites it, or sometimes it’s the other way round.” They don’t always agree. “Sometimes I write something and she tells me she doesn’t like it, so we have a discussion.” He comes out of those arguments seeing things differently. “I always learn from her. It’s a different culture, a woman’s point of view.”
That openness extends to the artists he admires. “When I like an artist, I try to collaborate with them.” Friendship led to work with Mexico City’s Sonido Gallo Negro. “We became friends, and we collaborated with their percussion player.” The duo have also shared stages with Ghetto Kumbé from Bogotá. “I like that project a lot, with more African percussion, but with electronic music.”
The pandemic caught the couple in Mexico City. “We were stuck in a hotel for almost two years, with about 80 people from different origins living there. It was like a Tower of Babel: Russians, Brazilians, Americans, all stuck in that moment of the pandemic.” Memo kept working through it, and turned their room into a studio. “We recorded an EP in one of the rooms where we were living, sometimes during the night. You can even hear the siren of a police car passing. It’s part of the track.” Released in 2022, the EP, titled Classe-Hic, took European repertoire, including his version of “Misirlou”, into cumbia. “I took some European music, European classical music, and played it in electro-cumbia, with electronic tools.”
Hybrid Gun took shape in the same years, though it started life as something else. “At the beginning, the idea was to make two EPs. The first was called Chin and the second Gun. Chingón, in Mexico, is a very good guy, you know.” The timing worked against him. “We launched the first EP just at the moment of the pandemic, in 2020, so the project changed a lot. I reimagined the whole thing, taking some of the tracks from the two EPs and adding new ones.” The result is a step away from where he started. “Before, I was doing more psychedelic cumbia, very influenced by chicha, and electronic music too. In this album I’m putting in more of my other influences, not only cumbia: pop, electronic music, even rock music I listened to in the past, and a lot of lo-fi.” The detail went into the production. “I tried to work more on the sound, on the textures of the sound.” Manon’s voice is also far more present. “There is more participation from Manon. There are more voices in all the tracks, even though I work with a lot of effects on the voices, and some of them are songs in their structure.”
The title comes from the way the couple live. “It’s a hybridisation of our whole life, of our life in Europe and our life in Mexico. We used to spend half of the year in Mexico and half in Europe, so we have both points of view.” For Memo, that mix is a weapon. “This hybridisation is our best gun to go on.” He sees it working every day. “I think hybrid culture is the future of the cultures in the world, and we can see it here in Brussels: a lot of people from different origins living together and learning from each other.” His own sound depends on it. “My music is not only Latin music. I could never make this music if I lived in Mexico. It’s very influenced by Indian music, African music, Arab music, because here all my neighbours are from different origins.”
The singles were released in a deliberate order, starting with the hardest. “We started with ‘Sabor a Sal’. It’s more like salsa, electronic salsa, and it’s very noisy, so it’s not one of the easiest tracks on the album. But the voices have a lot of Auto-Tune and the chorus is very poppy, so there’s a contrast in this track.” Next came “Pop Cariñito”, built on a harmonic coincidence. “It’s a cover of two songs, in fact: ‘Popcorn’ and ‘Cariñito’. We start with the melody of ‘Popcorn’ in a cumbia rhythm, and at one moment it changes to ‘Cariñito’, because it’s almost the same harmony.” The latest, “Ciclos”, follows a woman who keeps her own pace. “In society, everything goes very fast, life goes very fast, but the character is in her own world, inside her own mind. She goes at the pace of her own life. Sometimes you are up, sometimes you are down, but you continue in your own way.” The music matches the story. “The rhythm is very Caribbean, so it’s calm. It’s to feel good. Just feel good and go on.”
The album opens with “Salome”, the track Memo sees as its centre. “It condenses this idea of the hybridisation of influences, and it’s very feminine in its vibe. It’s very slow.” That slowness is the key to the whole project. “I think our music is wild, with a punk energy, but the rhythm is very slow. The rhythm makes you dance. For the girls, it’s very easy to get into, because it’s not violent.”
That music was about to meet a completely new crowd. At the time of the call, the duo were preparing for their first trip to Asia. “We have nine dates in Japan. It’s our first time in Japan, so we are very, very happy and very excited.” From early December to early January they were due in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, and Memo planned to stay long enough to absorb the place. “When we tour, we try to make it part of life too, an experience of life. We’ll spend a month there, to be immersed in the city, the country, the culture, the food, the music.” Some of the shows were with local bands. “We’re going to play with some Japanese cumbia bands. It’s a totally different way to access cumbia, from their background, so I hope to learn a lot from them.”
Most of those Japanese crowds would be hearing the duo for the first time, and for them Memo describes a party before he describes a sound. “Memo Pimiento is a hybrid duo with very hybrid influences that makes wild parties. The goal is to make a wild party together, where people can leave all their problems behind and be free: free to dance, free to make friends, to feel good together.” It is the same thinking that keeps him listening to his neighbours’ music in Brussels and that gave the album its name: a room where everyone comes in together, whatever their origins. “The differences between us are beautiful. It’s beautiful to learn about others who are different from you.”
Hybrid Gun is out now and, like the rest of Memo Pimiento’s discography, you can find it on Bandcamp For tour dates and news, head to their website