Tango with a twist

Sometimes it takes three to tango, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

Some of the tango musicians who have come into the studio to record tracks for the Gotan Project have been rather surprised by what they did with them, Christoph Muller says with a grin. "But I think they were agreeably surprised, even if it remained a little mysterious to them what we actually did with what they played. And, maybe, why people liked it."

What Gotan Project does with the sounds of the bandoneon, piano, guitar, a string quartet, clarinet, flute, trumpet and voices - the improbable combination that is the typical tango orchestra - is create music that has become, with almost no fanfare, the international dance downloaders' favourite.

Using programming technology, they lay the musicians' tracks across dance beats that give the familiar glide of tango an irresistible drive.

"Recording is like shooting a film," Muller says. "We end up with a lot of footage that we completely reconstruct."

Muller, an electronic composer who is one third of Gotan's core team, would fit any casting agency's idea of an experimental musician: Swiss, thin and serious, he sits in perfect counterpoint to the group's guitarist and genial paterfamilias, Argentinian Eduardo Makaroff.

We have been talking for nearly an hour when Philippe Cohen Solal, keeping rock'n'roll time, comes in with the sort of flourish he manages to project on stage from behind his keyboard. Somehow, the three of them fit together.

They met in Paris. The world music phenomenon might have come out of London, thanks to Peter Gabriel and the sheer number of South Asian musicians working there, but Muller says Paris is the real melting pot.

He and Cohen Solal began working together in 1995, producing music for commercials and films; salsa was a popular client choice, so they often found themselves South American musicians.

Makaroff was one of them; he had gone to Paris hoping to extend a new-found enthusiasm for traditional tango into something new. "I was looking not only to make acoustic tango," he says, "I wanted to make tango that was modern music. I think I dreamed to put tango again into the hearts and ears of young people who don't know it."

Tango, as Makaroff explains, is a kind of world music in its own right. Famously born in the brothels of Buenos Aires around the turn of the 20th century, its rhythms were set by black musicians hired to entertain the clientele. German sailors brought with them the bandoleon, a kind of accordion with a huge range designed to stand in for an organ in small churches.