In the sparkly, off-kilter world of Miami electro-pop duo Afrobeta, a new party anthem is bubbling under the surface all the time. Even if it's outside of official studio hours and even if half the group is sleeping and even if that song started as a fragment or a half-joke.
Daniel Sannwald
Afrobeta: Back to the future.
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Afrobeta
At County Grind Live Music, with Sumsun, This Heart Electric, Dino Felipe, Boxwood, the Astrea Corporation, Möthersky, and Radio-Active Records DJs. 8 p.m. Saturday, January 14, at Green Room, 109 SW Second Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $5; age 21 and up. Call 954-449-1025.
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Such was the genesis of one of the group's latest new live staples, a ditty it's dubbed "Birthday Celebration" and saves for serenading celebrating fans. The song began as an off-the-cuff tune that frontwoman Christy "Cuci" Amador sang to her mother for her last birthday. Then, when Amador's own birthday came around, she got a musical surprise from Tony "Smurphio" Laurencio, the other half of the pair.
"The song was something really dumb and funny," she recalls. "But Tony came into the room at midnight and woke me up to the song. He had finished a whole other verse to it and developed and produced it."
In the Afrobeta universe, the lines separating work, play, and personal life seem blurred to almost nonexistence. Amador and Laurencio live together, make music all day and night together, and, now, tour the world together, sharing stages with leading electronic-music legends from San Francisco to Ibiza.
To say their relationship is "close" is probably wrong; it's more like symbiosis. Not only do Amador and Laurencio finish sentences for each other but they interpret as well. Ask one a question and the other is likely to explain the question in further detail.
All of this is to the fans' benefit. If the inner workings of Afrobeta are almost insular to a point, it translates as an expansive, inclusive, and wholly unique sound that spans pop and electronic genres. Afrobeta is a little freestyle, a little tech-house, a little electro, a tiny bit dubstep, a little funk, and a little rock 'n' roll, and the band isn't even afraid to kick in the occasional all-acoustic ballad. Yet it all works, thanks to a core built on Laurencio and Amador's joint songwriting.
The symbiosis has also made the band one of the most electrifying live acts to come from the local circuit. Playing off each other's cues, Amador and Laurencio control a performance like a DJ set, taking the energy up and down and drawing parts out as needed.
This is all done completely live, with Laurencio manning a tower of keyboards and controls while Amador flits between her own synth and laptop, hitting keys and buttons before dancing back to the front of the stage. As a frontwoman too, she's part singer, part cheerleader. Call-and-response tactics figure frequently, as do any other tricks Amador might pull out when the fringes of a crowd are failing to ignite.
"Sometimes I focus on those people more than I should," she says. "It's a battle where you try to get people involved. I have flags, and maybe I'll try to hit them with the flag or throw something. But then I have to bring it back to where I am — I'll have to look at Tony and be like, 'Where are we right now?' "
That Amador's previous "day job" was as an actress, especially popular in Spanish-language commercials, isn't a shock. What does surprise, though, is that she and Laurencio started Afrobeta five-and-a-half years ago as near strangers. Laurencio was already a popular figure on the Miami scene, both as a member of the fiercely beloved Spanish fusion act Suenalo and as a studio and touring musician for artists like Pitbull. Amador was a friend of a friend who at the time offered only a short stint in the Miami live electro group organicArma to her musical credit. As an almost starstruck Suenalo fan, she had to work up the nerve to give Laurencio a demo after a show one day.
Since then, the other acts gradually fell away. Laurencio even turned down an offer to become a full-time member of Pitbull's live band to stick with Afrobeta. The payoff of this laser focus, as well as steady gigging around Miami and a residency at Miami Beach hangout Jazid, paid off. The group's local draw and spark-plug performances landed them a deal with Do IT Music Group, a label and management house run by Charlie and Russell Faibisch, cofounders of Ultra Music Festival.
Yes, that helped Afrobeta score its first slot at the festival, in 2010. But its own merits helped it graduate to bigger stages at the 2011 edition, which it closed out Sunday night in the massive live stage's headlining slot. Last summer too, the group completed the full run of the summer Identity Festival tour, the country's first traveling all-electronic music festival. (Weather issues forced the postponement and then cancellation of the planned Miami stop.)
The "summer camp for artists" atmosphere, as Amador puts it, led to some fruitful and diverse connections. "Our bus mates were the Crystal Method," she says, "so we shared our music with them, they shared their music with us, and we became really great friends." Later, during one rainy day on the tour stop, Laurencio won over Aussie twin-DJ duo Nervo with a piano rendition of Men at Work songs. The four eventually wrote a track together, which will hopefully make it onto Afrobeta's planned upcoming new EP, due out in the spring.
