“I am not nostalgic, but I want to convey an emotion“, He confessed Flavio etcheto to this newspaper before taking the stage of La Tangente to present Super bright. Within 10 days it will be two years since that return to the Buenos Aires stages, becoming his last local performance following this Thursday the news of the death of this icon of the Argentine musical avant-garde.
The musician, producer and brand new singer (following the appearance of the aforementioned EP) died at the age of 52 in Mar del Plata, a city that adopted him for just over a decade. He knew how to deal with liver disease. He noticed it himself on his Instagram account, where, although he was not a regular, he used to update his friends and followers regarding his news. But a cancer ended up giving him the lunge. Although he knew that the outcome might be the worst, and following in the footsteps of David Bowie in his last days, he never stopped making music.
On December 10 he launched “When he calls”, the most recent single from Island of the states, electronic pop group that led along with Lolo Gasparini. And last week he finished what is today his posthumous material, which will soon see the light through the Casa del Puente label. A farewell so obvious that he himself was in charge of making the cover. It will carry by title Ambient, and it will consist of two tracks.
Just that title reflects one of his weaknesses, as well as one of the musical movements of which he knew how to be a plenipotentiary in Argentina: electronic music. He had the great ability to split between a more introspective cadence and another directed towards the dance floor. Metaphor for your personality. With his project Trineo he released two albums that show his spirit and elegance: a homonymous one from 1998, which he supported I don’t believe it. And in the middle he premiered with Gustavo Cerati the electronic laboratory Leisure, with which he launched two sensational works.
The relationship between the two goes back to the album Dynamo (1992), where he even performed the trumpet on the song “Fue”, which exposed his skill and expertise. After confirming it in the album Holy colors (1992), signed by Cerati and Daniel Melero, Etcheto became one of the greatest allies of the former leader of Soda Stereo. I participate in Stereo dream (1995), and later, when the singer-songwriter dared to try solo, he was a fundamental figure in Puff (1999). There he participated in the recording process, the tour and was even a co-star of the video for “Paseo immoral”. The partnership spread to the film’s soundtrack + Good (2001) and the album Always is today (2002), as well as the trio Smoking, which was joined by another great Cerati collaborator: Leandro Fresco. Although they did not leave any official record, their sets (with cowboy hats as identikit) are still memorable.
While he might take advantage of that close bond, Flavius or Flav, as he was also known, never got on someone else’s success. “I matured a lot with his disappearance,” he said in that interview to this newspaper regarding Cerati’s absence. Although it always shone with its own light, Daniel Melero was in charge of enhancing its quality to illuminate. The former Los Encargados recruited him for his solo albums Conga (1989) and Camera. However, a couple of years before he collaborated with La Sobrecarga on their album Lying and believing, and with El Corte in The opposite way.
After making a name for yourself with La Algodonera, an experimental outburst that was resurrected in 2020 on its platform Bandcamp (his self-titled album appeared on cassette thanks to the Incierto Catalog label, carried out by Melero), the turning point of his career happened alongside Leo Ramella in Resonant. With that tandem he produced three essential works to understand a piece of contemporary Argentine popular music.
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