“Why Listen to Today's Music?”

Electronic Music in Mi Juventud Unida by Mariano Blatt

Abstract

In Mariano Blatt’s early books —Increíble (2007), El pibe de oro (2009), Hielo locura (2011), and No existís (2011), collected in Mi juventud unida (2015)— a strong musical dimension emerges, allowing these poems to be considered from the ancient notion of mousiké, where poetry, music, and dance converge as inseparable practices. These texts coincide with the author’s youth and explore a bodily and identity-based experience shaped by nocturnality, entheogenic substances, and, especially, electronic music. The long poem “El paraíso, el espacio exterior” (2007) condenses this intersection: there, the electronic party becomes a space of communion and transformation, where listening, intensified by the darkness of the club, turns rhythm into a perceptual core and transfers it to writing through lists, repetitions, and fragmentary sequences. This article, therefore, aims to analyze, in particular, how Blatt’s poetry engages with electronic music and its urban imaginaries, and how the poem “Diego Bonnefoi” is configured as a zone of activity that spans multiple media and circuits: from a duo with a Dj, through its inclusion in the CAD (Combinado Argentino de Danza), to its institutionalization in a provincial poetry festival.