Dinky (Horizontal/Cocoon) Support: Robin Keys

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Don’t let the name fool you: Dinky is a powerhouse. Inheritor of the diminutive nickname before she was even born, Alejandra Iglesias has grown her stature the old-fashioned way, with focus and determination and, of course, killer DJ skills and a catalog filled with classic, gamechanging tracks. Active since the mid ‘90s, the international traveler has seen scene after scene try to ...claim her as their own, but she’s never stayed in one place, musically speaking, long enough to get mired in yesterday’s ideas. Her restlessness is our gain.
Born and raised in Santiago, Dinky is a leading member of Chile’s second generation of electronic-music greats. Like so many of her artistic compatriots, her music reflects both her roots and the experiences of a highly peripatetic lifestyle. Caught up in the musical revolution started by the likes of Ricardo Villalobos, Dandy Jack and Atom Heart in the early ‘90s, she taught herself to mix records and was soon appearing at desert raves. It was in New York, where she had moved in the mid ‘90s to join the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, that Dinky’s career began to take off, as she immersed herself in the city’s vital underground scene of the day and became a regular behind the decks. In 2000, just 23 years old and armed with only an MPC 2000, she turned out her first productions; within a couple of years she had released a spate of records, ranging from trim, nuanced minimal techno to downcast electro-pop, on Cologne’s Traum Schallplatten as well as New York’s Sonic Groove and Carpark labels.
In 2003, forced by U.S. immigration laws to leave the country, Dinky lit out for Berlin, a city that had captured her imagination nine years earlier during the heyday of E-Werk and Tresor. It was a good move: by 2005 she would release the massive “Acid In My Fridge” for Sven Väth’s Cocoon imprint, and the following year she landed a residency at Väth’s infamous Cocoon parties at Ibiza’s Amnesia. Both DJing and playing live, Dinky has gone on to become a regular fixture across the continental scene—from Ibiza’s Circo Loco to top-draw festivals like Sonar, 10 Days Off and Sonne Mond Sterne—while in Berlin she currently holds the honor of a Panorama Bar residency.
Even if you’ve never caught Dinky live, you can get a good sense for her unique style from her two mix CDs, 2007’s Get Lost 03 (Crosstown Rebels) and 2008’s Dinky Mixes Horizontal (P-Vine). Folding phrases with origami grace, they present interwoven percussive grooves flecked with scraps of melody; they’re lush and dryly funky, jacking and introspective all at once. Dinky’s own productions work in similar ways. Whether working with samples, software, hardware or some combination of all three, she builds compact, complex worlds out of sound, using only the bare essentials. It’s hard to think of another producer who has imbued the principals of minimalism with such soul. Stripped-back grooves do only as much as needed to keep the pulse rippling, while scraps of synths, voices, or sampled who-knows-what flit about like nervous ghosts. Often it’s impossible to tell how Dinky has put together her tracks, which seem partly collage, partly the expression of some sentient machine.

The most recent phase of Dinky’s production finds her experimenting more than ever. With the launch of her own Horizontal label in 2005, she began moving in the direction of jittery, cut-up house; the label now has 10 releases and counting, featuring not only Dinky’s own productions but also records from Matthew Styles, Jambi, Andres Bucci and more. In 2008, Dinky released her third album, May Be Later, and an EP for Berlin’s Vakant label, exploring ever more intricate polyrhythms and uncanny timbres. In 2009, fellow expat-in-Berlin Mathew Jonson invited her to join his Wagon Repair label, resulting in the four-track Lydian EP and the full-length Anemik. Having proven time and again that she can pump out tracks for the most demanding dance floors, here she lets her imagination and her fingertips guide her to a more secluded place, using exclusively hardware synths, sequencers and drum machines, and even Fender Telecaster and Rhodes keyboard, as her raw materials. The results range widely in style and mood, but they all come together, crystallizing (and this music is nothing if not crystalline) into a single idea or a single image: something like a sun-dappled clearing in the woods, far from any “proper” nightlife, marked by close friends, good sound and no intrusions from the outside world, where the music is free to roam.

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