Putochinomaricón is using pop as a tool for fictional speculation and political resistance

Much like their name, Putochinomaricón’s work is ballsy, political, tongue-in-cheek. They’re firmly grounded in more alternative electronic scenes such as hyperpop and glitchcore. The music is political, using parody to unlock conversations about racism, corporeality, and trauma. They’re even propagating discussion on decolonised dance music at Primavera Pro next week.

Putochinomaricón got their first hit with 2019’s “Gente de Mierda” (“shitty people”), where the video currently has over one million views on YouTube. It sounds as though someone ran a landfill 80s song through a giant waste shredder, which you might think is a rather backhanded compliment. That’s where you’d be wrong - for Tsai, the grim and grotesque is at the heart of their music.

On 20 December 1990, Chenta Tsai Tseng was born in Taiwan, immigrating to Spain ten months later. Their parents, having studied Spanish philology, had always wanted to move somewhere Spanish-speaking, so they settled in Madrid. To this day, Tsai and their family encounter structural racism in Spain, not at all helped by COVID.

“We noticed all these tropes like the yellow peril and of how we avoid taxes… this led to Spain cancelling a lot of bank accounts of Chinese names,” they say. “My bank account and my family’s bank account were suspended because of that. It’s not a coincidence when hundreds of accounts have been suspended and they’re all Chinese.”

Tsai grew up in a “very white neighbourhood”, where they studied piano and violin at the Madrid Royal Conservatory: a “classical model minority East Asian stereotype”, they joke. They found themselves in another of what would be many liminal, purgatorial spaces - places where they felt caught between two ends of a spectrum. The conservatory could be snobby and elitist - one professor claimed rap and pop music wasn’t “music” - but pop wasn’t exactly a clear solace, either. “I always felt like I wasn’t allowed to enjoy pop music because I never saw a body like mine,” they explain. “I was never interested in music until I went to Taiwan.”

In Taiwan, Tsai discovered A-Mei, a Puyuma (Taiwanese aboriginal) singer. “First of all, I love her music because she is a pop diva. But in the second place, I never saw an East Asian - or a Taiwanese person in this case - being a pop musician. To see her on MTV was a futurity - there were no Spanish-Tawianese artists.”

It’s fitting, then, that Tsai went on to literally study how to create space - by pursuing architecture and music at university. Although they’ve forgotten a lot of their architectural degree, it’s shaped them as an artist: “When you’re an architect, you have to constantly be researching, innovating, and contradicting yourself in order to evolve. These three qualities have been very important for me to make music.”

Amongst fans and critics, Tsai is considered part of the global hyperpop movement; they’re still not sure about their feelings on it. “I think there’s no artist that identifies with the term hyperpop,” they laugh. “We accept it because it facilitates the communication.” On the other, although they identify strongly with the trans and nonbinary community in hyperpop spaces, they feel more work needs to be done in the community. “It’s ironic, because hyperpop is so, so inspired by Asian music, especially Japanese. That’s why I’m always questioning myself, up to what point is this an appropriation of this? Our leaders are all white people.”

Tsai also believes that because the visibility of Asian people are so small in the Western hyperpop sphere (they can only really name of Alice Longyu Gao and Chester Lockhart), it’s harder to speak up about these issues - especially in Spain. “They are not only inspired by Japanese music but also by the aesthetic, but up to a point where Asian-fishing seems to be very normalised… It’s so difficult to speak out about these things because these are people with whom you work with.”

In the world of hyperpop, Tsai could be somewhat approximated to acts like Dorian Electra - unabashedly queer expressions that lean into ridicule and parody to make their point. Where Putochinomaricón differs, however, is the focus on the bodily experience as a point of equal joy and trauma, and the use of pop as a tool for resistance.

It was a trip back to Taiwan for two years during lockdown that inspired their debut album, JÁJÁ ÉSQÚÍSDÉ (Distopía Aburrida). The first half of the title comes from Spanish text slang for laughing. The second half came from the pandemic: ‘I was watching a lot of dystopian films like Blade Runner, and it was very funny because we’ve always predicted the future ends in a very, very massive and epic way. In reality, we were all in our houses watching Love is Blind and making bread.”

In Taiwan, COVID didn’t come until May 2021, which meant that Tsai could explore the LGBT+ scene and electronic scene for the first time. “I usually went during the summers and have always been in an isolated space in my grandparents’ house - so my view of Taiwan was very distorted, it was like this utopia. When I went back, a lot of things were deconstructed.”

Tsai found themselves relieved to be in a space where they didn’t have to explain themselves: “If you are in an LGBT collective, you are just an LGBT person, but they don’t understand the intersection between being a POC and being LGBT.” In Taiwan, this wasn’t necessarily a problem; what was uncomfortable was Tsai’s treatment as being a foreigner. “I didn’t speak Chinese properly, and I didn’t live the Taiwanese culture. Even though I met a lot of people for the Taiwanese LGBT community, we didn’t really connect in the way that I thought I’d connect with them. This disenchantment is a very important process for a lot of diasporic people - especially for those who immigrated like me when I was ten months old. You need to open the possibility to exist neither here nor there and to find comfort in that space.”

Still, it was in Taiwan where they felt genuinely desired for the first time, which they credit as one of the most important things to happen to them during their stay. “We see ourselves from the white lens, and we see ourselves as these extremely ugly, undesireable people - and I actually believed all this until I went back to Taiwan. It was the first time I felt desired away from the fetishisation, away from these structures of power.”

It’s why the glitch is so important in Tsai’s work, which he takes inspiration from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, “who wanted to tell dissident stories that were uncomfortable, that were ugly. My research to ugliness came from there. From there, I discovered the manifesto of Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, which talked about the importance of legitmising abstractness and immateriality - which leads a lot to what SOPHIE was investigating.”

Reading a Pitchfork article about the decolonisation of DAWs also prompted some further questions that needed to be answered with their music. “That was a game changer for me. I suddenly realised I am talking about the colonisation of our bodies and identities, but it was hypocritical of me to go back to my living room and use Ableton, where you open it and it has a tuning system that is Western, it marks a four-by-four rhythm. I wanted to use this DAW in the most incorrect way possible.”

Tsai found themselves using synths as percussive elements, using voices of others on Skype calls as samples. Instead of creating lyrics, they focused on textures and delivering a “spatial” experience. Although they initially started using traditional Taiwanese instruments and traditions, the demos were “Orientalist”, and written from a “very white perspective.” Instead, they opted for the sounds of Taiwanese garbage trucks, which play “Für Elise” as they pass by. “This field study, this way of reconstructing instruments from these codes of what I understood as Taiwan is how I reapproached and decolonised how I produced music.”

PC Music OG GFOTY (Polly-Louisa Salmon) also teamed up with Tsai for their debut, on the hyperactive, fast-paced “Tamagotchi”. Tsai had long looked up to GFOTY, and was excited to have collaborated with her. “She’s the most irreverent, the most experimental reference inside the whole spectrum of PC Music. GFOTY is one of the few that actually not only experiments with sound, but also the lyrics and the visuals. I have so much respect for her.”

Tsai is working on a new EP based on the life of Afong Moy, considered one of the first Asian American immigrants. Two brothers, Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, brought her to America, whereupon they exhibited Moy in a human zoo to sell their own goods from the “exotic East”. “She was known as the Chinese Lady,” Tsai tells me. “When she grew out of fashion and people were not interested anymore, she suddenly disappeared.”

Tsai believes this is how it sometimes feels to be East Asian in Spain: commodified and tokenised. “They use us to complete quotas, or to instrumentalise us to appear in ads to make a business look more woke and diverse…. There’s so many things I don’t even want to talk about, but there’s so many things that we still have to do in Spain.”

They’re also taking off half the year, going back to Taiwan to study the history of music (the label aren’t exactly pleased). But for Tsai, this is essential to their journey as an artist: “The line between the content creators and the musician is blurring - and it’s very interesting, but it’s dangerous. Suddenly we’re creating music not because we want to defy or explore ourselves, but because we want to please the public. To study the history of music away from an Occidental perspective - it’s like when Kate Bush decided not to give a concert in five years and learn how to dance. I don’t want to negotiate my art.”