[Five Days of ¡DALE!] Day 3: THE MATADOR

[In our world, it's ALWAYS Moombahton Monday, and so we're serving it up this week with  5 daily doses!  Our growing community is exploding with fresh faces and mad skills, for which recognition should given in extensive amounts!  Every day for 5 days we will be giving a shout-out to emerging tropical bass/moombahton producers who may be well recognized within this VIRAL scene, but perhaps not across the board. Dale Moombahton!]
Hailing from Cambridge Massachusetts, 22 year-old THE MATADOR aka Esteban Pacheco, has been through a whirlwind of name changes, split-personalities, and sonic redirections within just the last year. While his productions under his former pseudo “NBR2” earned him praise from several distinguished Chi-town/East Coast rappers Napalms and Moufy, respectively, Pacheco took some personal time off from music to explore different creative ventures in the visual world, before returning to his music and forming his current productionpseudo, The Matador. And now back on his producing game, his sonic creations that have been slowly infiltrating the moombah realm as of late have inevitably caught our eye: and we insist that you too direct your aural attention onto this young emerging producer and his ground-breaking productions immediately.

What makes The Matador‘s productions standout in this hyper-oversaturated digital realm is his slightly unorthodox and multifaceted approach to his music: Pacheco is a visual artist by trade, by personal calling; dabbling in everything from photography to cinematography to painting. Then there is his real life alter-ego, he fondly refers to as  “Johny Draper” – who is the “madman” – and the other half of his split persona that Esteban has unabashedly embraced. Together, Esteban believes that Johny Draper  – or in essence the acceptance and encouragement of his inner delirium -  has drawn his focus back to his music and has fostered the progression of his own personal sound; produced under the stage name – THE MATADOR.

“I don’t mind getting weird as long as the music’s right. That’s all I care about,” Pacheco writes via email. Who are we to argue? When the music is right, it’s right. And in the case of The Matador, his productions, are right on the mark.

His music is the culmination of a hybrid of influences from his urban roots, inter-blended with the impressions left on him from his time spent in South America and from (across the wayyyy other end of the sonic spectrum) the Berlin minimal techno scene. The result being an extraordinarily fresh-feeling brand of sound.

I haven’t heard anything quite like The Matador‘s personal repository of super tribal fuego, urban-booty bass, and Latin house in the moombahton/global bass/tropical tech house context. With thoroughly well-rounded productions, refreshing percussion layers, and a thoughtfully integrated rainbow array of diverse yet relevant samples, I can’t understand why more people haven’t caught onto this quirky fella’s sonic antics. But hopefully now they will.

All of The Matador’s tracks are available for free download on his Soundcloud, or check out and download a few we’ve spotlighted below:

Lady Saw – If him lef (Matador’s Remix)

Louchi Lou – Rich Girl (Matador Remix)

The Matador – Touch it

The Matador – The Drop

The Matador – Underground

The Matador – The Earth Below

The Matador – Drapers Mission

By: TD