In the video for their hit single “Ciervos” (Stags), members of the Chilean electro-pop band Astro wave spears and romp around in furry pelts and animal skulls as if part of some Bronze Age lost tribe.
It’s intended to be the last word in low-budget primitive cool, Andean style. But for viewers of a certain demographic profile, the imagery may summon surreal memories of Peter Gabriel, his face camouflaged like an African mask, making tortured connections with shrieking simians.
No doubt the similarities between “Ciervos” and Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey,” an early ’80s cry of inter-species angst, are inadvertent. (They’re more explicit in Astro’s song “Mono Tropical,” about monkeys guarding Mayan pyramids.)
But speaking by phone in Spanish from their Santiago home, two members of the Astro core quartet, Andrés Nusser and Octavio Cavieres, affirm that ’70s British art-rock chameleons such as Gabriel and David Bowie, and ever-mutating bands like Genesis, were among their youthful instructors.
It’s not hard to grasp how the highly theatrical stage antics of that era served as an exoskeleton for Astro’s development into one of South America’s wildest ensembles. The band will perform Thursday night at the Fonda theater on an alt-Latin bill along with La Santa Cecilia, Carla Morrison and Bomba Estereo.
“It was a species of rock that was pop, but at the same time it had a component that was more psychedelic, or more progressive,” says Cavieres, the band’s drummer. “That was a great influence on us at the beginning.”
Perhaps no Latin American country is currently experiencing a greater surge of youthful artistic energy than Chile. Filmmakers such as Pablo Larraín (the Oscar-nominated “No”) and Dominga Sotomayor (“Thursday Till Sunday”) are regularly popping up on international movie festival circuits. A new generation of playwright-directors led by Guillermo Calderón, who’ll be returning to REDCAT in downtown L.A. next month, is putting its mark on collective-based experimental theater.
