Artist Profile: Matias Aguayo

A shape-shifter by nature and necessity, Matias Aguayo was born in Santiago de Chile and came of age in the pastoral Gummersbach, Germany, just outside Cologne. As a teenager, he immersed himself in theatre, absorbing its lessons in voice, movement, and presence. These skills would later bleed into his live performances, where he moves with the unselfconscious confidence of someone who’s never really left the stage. For Aguayo, sound is a social language that cuts through noise and isolation and summons a sense of togetherness. This fall, Bucharest will again fall under this spell when, on Friday, May 9, Aguayo returns to Control Club with a new live set, sharing the bill with Mexico’s Iñigo Vontier.

Aguayo’s formal entry into the electronic scene came in the late 1990s, just as the Cologne-based Kompakt label was carving out a name for itself in Europe’s increasingly self-serious minimal techno scene. In 1997, he partnered with Michael Mayer as Zimt, releasing the single U.O.A.A. It was a minor release by Kompakt standards but hinted at Aguayo’s resistance to rigidity. That spirit bloomed in Closer Musik, his duo with Dirk Leyers. Their 2002 album After Love was a pristine, emotive, and sleek genre-defining document. But the accolades did little to disguise Aguayo’s creative restlessness. Minimalism, for all its precision and quiet drama, began to feel like a cage.

His solo debut, Are You Really Lost (2005), began an elegant revolt against minimalism’s cold machinations. Here, Aguayo’s voice emerged as his signature instrument: guttural, elastic, capable of producing both percussive accents and melodic fragments. By the time Ay Ay Ay landed in 2009, his vocal dexterity had become a calling card. Rollerskate, one of its standout tracks, wraps tongue-twisting chants around hypnotic polyrhythms, echoing Latin American oral traditions even as it courts the dancefloor. Aguayo wasn’t just making music. He was conjuring entire borderless microclimates.

But Aguayo’s most radical gesture may not have been musical. In 2009, he co-founded Cómeme, a label and collective that quickly evolved into one of the most adventurous nodes in the global electronic underground. Cómeme was born partly out of frustration with the eurocentric club circuit, with the antiseptic logic of commercial techno, and partly out of love for cities like Bogotá, Monterrey, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. What began with a few off-grid parties and USB stick track swaps quickly became a decentralized movement.

Through Cómeme, Aguayo and co-founder Avril Ceballos gave a platform to artists whose work was often too strange, rhythmic, vocal, or Latin to fit prevailing tastes. Rebolledo, with his desert disco swagger, became a cult favorite. Daniel Maloso brought a sleek futurism that nodded to early EBM. Ana Helder, one of the label’s earliest Argentine signings, contributed razor-sharp funk mutations, while Philipp Gorbachev, from Moscow, delivered delirious synth sermons on tracks like Arrest Me. Alejandro Paz, Sano, and Carisma added layers of post-punk, salsa, and reggaeton into Cómeme’s strange gumbo, while DJs like Diegors, DJs Parela, and Christian S blurred the lines between DJing and live performance. The compilations Solidarity Forever, El Untitled, and Gasoline, alongside albums like Maloso’s In and Out and Rebolledo’s Super Vato, gave voice to a generation of artists unafraid to get weird in public.

Cómeme’s aesthetic has always been less about genre than about tension. Its motto could easily be Aguayo’s own: rhythm as liberation.

That ethos bled into his Bumbumbox parties, launched in 2006. In cities across South America, Aguayo turned public spaces into ephemeral dancefloors, hauling speakers into intersections and parks and inviting anyone within earshot to participate.

By the early 2010s, Aguayo’s output had become even more kaleidoscopic. The Visitor (2013) and Sofarnopolis (2017) expanded his palette, drawing from Afro-Colombian percussion, krautrock, and psychedelic rock. In Sofarnopolis, recorded with his band The Desdemonas, Aguayo constructs a mythic city teeming with sound and movement into a kind of post-capitalist sonic noir. Tracks like Cold Fever and Rrrrrriot! read as both celebration and critique in equal measure.

His collaborations have always followed a similarly borderless logic. In 2011, he contributed vocals to Battles’ Ice Cream, an off-kilter anthem that introduced him to indie audiences worldwide. His remix work for artists like Yasmine Hamdan and vocal contributions to hybrid performers like DJ Spoko or Deena Abdelwahed similarly underscore his commitment to a genuinely internationalist musical ethic.

Live, Aguayo is impossible to predict. DJ set, vocal performance, or dance piece, his shows blur every line they encounter. He often abandons the booth, wandering into the crowd with a microphone, manipulating loops in real time, and building grooves from scratch. There’s always a sense that the show could fall apart at any moment, precisely what gives it electricity.

In recent years, Aguayo has expanded his practice beyond the club. His theatrical production Watch, created in collaboration with inmates at Paris’s Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital and director Olivier Fredj, premiered at Théâtre du Châtelet in 2021. Part performance, part intervention, Watch explored themes of surveillance, identity, and liberation, with music co-created by the participants themselves.

In April 2025, Aguayo unveiled his latest single, El Internet, on Radio Slave’s Rekids label. Unlike the densely layered vocalisms of Ay Ay Ay or the psychedelic sprawl of Sofarnopolis, El Internet is a stripped-back construction of polyrhythms and synthetic urgency. Its title alone signals Aguayo’s reflexive concern with the mediated world; how, once communal and physical, connection has become digitized and flattened into feeds and screens.

Even as he continues to produce new work, Aguayo remains committed to mentorship and collective growth. His workshops and collaborations with younger artists across Latin America and Europe have helped sustain a culture of experimentation within scenes that too often orbit major European capitals. His DJ sets remain unpredictable affairs that prioritize narrative over utility and risk over routine. In the bigger picture, Aguayo offers a countermodel to a music ecosystem dominated by branding and algorithmic sameness. His works are not products but propositions that music can still be ritual, rebellion, or refusal.