Lechuga Zafiro: A Story Behind Every Sound

The visceral impact of Lechuga Zafiro's album Desde Los Oídos De Un Sapo hits like an entirely new kind of dance music. The clattering rhythms break out of common conceptions of grid-oriented beats and the alien sound palette sounds like it was beamed in from parts unknown, but for Uruguayan producer Pablo de Vargas everything about his music is deeply personal. "I can tell you about every sound on the record," he explains from his apartment in Barcelona. "If you ask me about even the shortest sound, there's a story behind it."

Vargas has achieved his one-of-a-kind sound by making the most of his own extensive library of field recordings. From drumming on logs in the jungle to creatively manipulating a chorus of frogs, he's loaded his music with character that no one could duplicate. He's loaded up a Drum Rack with some of these custom sounds, exclusively available to download as part of this feature.

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Compared to working with conventional samples that point to specific uses and can be easily slotted into a composition, Vargas' determined approach has been a painstaking process.

"In my latest record there is one lead that is a harp sample and there might be an 808," he admits. "There are plug-ins I use that might enrich or add some synthesis to sounds I already have, but really 90 percent of the sounds I recorded myself. That's why it took me so, so long to make."

The startling otherness of Vargas' music didn't go unnoticed when Desde Los Oídos De Un Sapo came out on celebrated Colombian label Tra Tra Trax in 2024. The album landed prominent coverage in end-of-year charts, where it was feted as a shocking arrival from a breakthrough talent. While Vargas has a few smaller digital releases reaching back to 2015, he's been measured with the music he's released, all the while developing his sound practice. His career as an audio technician in television and film provided a foundation for his exploration of field recording.

"The starting point for my album was that I'm gonna make it just with the sounds I recorded myself," he explains. "I've been recording through all of these years. The hardest part for me, still, is actually deciding what sounds will go together. I worked on this album intermittently since 2021, but much of the work was more related to sound processing than actual composing, I guess that's why it took me so long."

While it might not be the most glamorous part of the creative process, when it came to starting work on the album in earnest, organisation was key to working with the huge body of sounds he had gathered over the previous decade. "I spent a lot of time reading about how to organize sounds properly," he reveals. "I'm obsessed with that. I organize it per year, per recording trip. I write a lot of notes, or I talk into the microphone and describe what I did. Reading a couple of Pierre Schaeffer books was also an eye opener. There were specific things I learned that were really important for me, like thinking about really small portions of time — what happens in the first 15 milliseconds of sounds and how that affects the way you perceive them."

The majority of sounds on Desde Los Oídos De Un Sapo were already captured before production began, but the making of specific tracks sometimes inspired further experimental recording sessions. While making rhythms out of water splashes, Vargas processed the sounds in a way that reminded him of glass which led him to tap out patterns on a glass table and other glass objects, all feeding into the final track 'Agua De Vidrio', which translates as 'glass water'. 

There are a lot of sounds on the album that retain their organic origins, but equally some distinctive tones sound deeply synthetic. The album closes on the title track, 'Desde Los Oídos De Un Sapo' ('from the ears of a toad'), a richly melodic piece rooted in layered up recordings of frogs. The lineage of the sound isn't immediately apparent, because Vargas processed these recordings through tools such as Zynaptic's Pitchmap.

"Because Pitchmap respects the frequency content of the sounds, I think you can still perceive that it's frog-related," Vargas points out, "but then some of the frequencies on those sounds are actually auto-tuned polyphonically for it to make sense within a scale."

Vargas documents his field recording adventures on social media, from jungles to mountains, open fields to abandoned hotels. His work is rooted in tactile play, drumming on metal railings and fallen trees, scrunching leaves and splashing in streams. When it's so easy to access sound without stepping away from your computer, Vargas' drive to explore and capture sound from anything in reach goes a long way towards injecting unique energy into his music. He's currently travelling to different locations to capture log-drumming recordings, from the Canary Islands to Croatia, to make a more stripped down EP of raw rhythms with a light touch of synthesis. But even beyond the samples he creates, the personal quality of Vargas' sound is defined by spatial design.

"I'm trying to build this impulse response collection of caves," he reveals. "I recorded some caves in Puerto Rico, Uruguay and the Canary Islands. The first time I did it in Uruguay, I just went to a cave not knowing exactly what I was gonna do. The reverb of that cave sounded incredible, really wet. The sound is thick… I don't know, there is a characteristic to it. I feel it's actually interesting to conceive your own spaces. The way you are related to the things you recorded gives you a purpose."

It's not just the sonics of Lechuga Zafiro that are loaded with meaning for Vargas. Rhythm is fundamental to the blistering impact of the music, making his tapestries of field recordings spring and bounce to patterns rooted in his Uruguayan upbringing. While he's currently studying Cuban and salsa percussion in Barcelona and disarmingly shares his own workouts on MIDI drum pads with disclaimers like "perdón percusionistas de verdad, todavía soy como un bebé q no sabe hablar bien," (sorry percussionists, I'm still like a baby who can't speak well), Vargas' connection to percussion is hardwired into his being. Principle in his rhythmic language is candombe, the Afro-Uruguayan music style that permeates all aspects of life in the country.

"You can't escape candombé if you live in Montevideo," Vargas points out. "I grew up there. It's really all over. It's in the streets for a start. You listen to it every weekend. It's gotten into popular recorded music. The way people play their guitar, the way people play their keyboards, it's all informed by that culture. Even if you go to the football stadium, the rhythm in how people sing is all related to candombe."

"When I started listening to people like Fela Kuti — people from the southern part of the world that actually believe in the rhythms they were born with — that's when I opened up my ears and eyes to what was happening in Uruguay. The same with kuduro or electronic West African stuff that was so similar to candombe, I actually understood that that was bigger than Uruguayan music — all these patterns transported to South America through enslaved people."

For Vargas, the inherent politics attached to these rhythms made them all the more important to express in his music. For years he has played with F5, a percussion group based in Montevideo that he brought onto his Boiler Room Buenos Aires set. Representing his culture and its connections to other cultures from the Southern Hemisphere becomes vital in a music scene often dominated by Western music standards. Candombe-informed hand-drummed patterns, whether captured in a field recording, jammed on a MIDI keyboard or thrashed out on some pads, form the basis of his beat constructions. As such, his work is not tethered to the grid but instead follows the foundation rhythm he lays down by hand, frequently spun further out by polyrhythmic layers that leave it up to the listener to determine the metronomic pulse.

If the rhythms weren't already unpredictable, Vargas also has a love of pulling apart a track with audacious interruptions that go much further sonically than the conventional dance music break down. At the mid-section of 'Cama Rota', the frenetic dembow-informed beat is derailed and takes a sharp left turn into a rolling groove shaped out by the manic squawks of a broken bed, only for the tempo to stagger down into a time-stretched pit before resolving. It's head-spinning by design, cultivated with the shock-factor intention you might otherwise hear in EDM or jump-up drum & bass.

"It's related to how your mind gets used to a rhythm and then all of a sudden, you shift the perception and then your mind changes," Vargas explains about his love of pulling a track apart at the seams. "It's like the way some drugs can make you feel that big shift in perception. I think it can really trick you, and at the same time it can feel nourishing for your mind."

The high-impact nature of Desde Los Oídos De Un Sapo makes it clear that club music plays an influential role in Vargas' musical outlook. The South American club scene in particular has been a guiding force, now crystallised with the release of the album on Tra Tra Trax, the Colombian label enjoying worldwide recognition for the sheer futurism and strong cultural identity of the artists they release. From 2013 to 2018 Vargas was involved in throwing parties in Montevideo, enjoying a healthy connection to scenes and collectives in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Santiago de Chile and Mexico City. Among the artists he truly admires from the region is Siete Catorce, a Mexican producer who led the way for South American electronic producers creating bold new club music with a strong sense of regional identity.

"Siete Catorce has always been one of my heroes," Vargas enthuses. "He released an EP in 2013 that was life changing for everyone in the scene at that time. I actually spent a couple of days in his home in LA a month ago and we did some tracks. I gave him some of my bird sounds and he created a crazy synth with it. Now that I have a more organized library, I want to start sharing my sounds with friends and see what they can come up with."

Despite this club connection, Vargas doesn't consider Desde Los Oídos De Un Sapo a particularly DJ-friendly record. In some ways it's understandable, given the slippery nature of the rhythms and the tendency for unpredictable switch-ups in the arrangement. Still, there have been enough adventurous DJs who have reached for the visceral firepower of the production and fed back positively. Meanwhile, Vargas has found his own way to blur the lines around conventional digital DJing and bring his percussive intrigue into any club set. He renders his tracks into separate stems and spreads them across separate CDJs, using hot cues and launch buttons like drum pads to hammer out and reconstruct his tracks on the fly.

"If you're an anxious person like me, it gives you a reason to be occupied all the time," he smiles. Pushing beyond the safety net of conventional DJing into the rhythmic knife edge of hand triggered beats doesn't sound like the work of an anxious person, and in his documented performances Vargas makes it look easy no matter how complex the drums become. It's just one of the ways he's struck out on his own, creating a searing impression on anyone who crosses paths with his music as they try to wrap their heads around this strange, wild new sound.

Follow Lechuga Zafiro on Instagram & Bandcamp

Text and Interview: Oli Warwick

Photos and videos courtesy of the artist