How El Guincho Went From Making ‘Very Freaky’ Music to Producing For Pop’s Cool Girls

On a densely landscaped block in Miami, a stone’s throw from the Biscayne Bay coastline, a canopy of banyan trees, royal palms and bullet trees eventually gives way to a cave. At least, that’s how Pablo Díaz-Reixa, the musician-producer known as El Guincho, likes to describe his home studio in the city’s Coconut Grove area.

A dark, squat room tucked directly underneath his bedroom, the cave is where Díaz-Reixa spends most of his waking moments. Sometimes, he’ll notch 12 hours a day there noodling on potential beats, tinkering with the drums or listening through stacks of vinyl records he keeps by the mixing board. “The sensation I get when I’m in the studio, making music, is incomparable,” he tells me on the muggy September day when I visit his place.

Stepping just outside his pint-size studio, though, Díaz-Reixa’s own living space is ample and decidedly un-cavelike. With skylights scattered throughout its tall ceilings, his modernist abode exudes a sense of calm even with his toddler son’s toys strewn about. The place used to be a Buddhist temple, he tells me, which the Dalai Lama blessed over FaceTime before it could become a home.

Though Díaz-Reixa misses his former (and longtime) home of Barcelona, which he and his wife traded for this Miami enclave in 2021, living in South Florida suits him. The Cuban influences here remind him of where he grew up, on the Canary Islands located off the northwest Africa coast. He prefers a quiet neighborhood like this to the overstimulating glitz of South Beach — a fitting turn for a man whose producer nom de plume name-checks a bird of prey prone to nesting in the same cozy spot for years. Miami’s proximity to Europe and other major U.S. cities for music, like New York and Los Angeles, doesn’t hurt. But living in this leafy environment has been a boon for the producer in other ways. “When you have something that’s expansive, big, with a view… well, you start to think bigger,” says Díaz-Reixa, 40, while taking gradual pulls from a cup of black coffee and kicking back on an earth-toned modular couch.

Were it not for Díaz-Reixa mentioning in passing that he’s preparing for studio sessions later that day with a certain artist (he’s tight-lipped about whom), he seems like any other area dad puttering around in house slippers, stealing away moments within the demands of childcare to mess around with songs on Ableton. The difference is that Díaz-Reixa happens to be a superproducer who frequently works alongside genre-defying and culture-shifting artists, including Björk, Rosalía, FKA Twigs and Charli XCX, and left-field Latin pop musicians like Kali Uchis and Nicki Nicole.

A former indie musician with a proclivity for making “very innovative, very freaky, very strange” music, as he puts it, in the mid- to late 2000s, Díaz-Reixa is now one of pop’s most in-demand producers, especially among artists looking to take creative risks. With his ear for distinctly outré sounds, Díaz-Reixa’s unconventional production is catalyzing pop’s transformation into something more amorphous and idiosyncratic. “I think he knows how to lead songs into a truly unique place by juxtaposing hard and soft sounds,” says Camila Cabello, who collaborated with Díaz-Reixa for every song on her 2024 album, C,XOXO. “Producers like him truly make my favorite pop music — bold and fresh.”

Díaz-Reixa’s ethos for producing music, pop and otherwise, is informed as much by his open ears as it is isolation. “I grew up without a lot of resources,” he says. “So for me, my way of listening to music was to make it myself.” While coming of age in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, one of the archipelago’s two capitals, he listened to salsa, African music and other genres coalescing there at the time. His grandmother, a talented pianist, taught him how to read music when he was a child, but she was hardly didactic about it. Those lessons unlocked something in him — as did his hunger to hear more of anything, everything, since he didn’t readily have access to top 40 radio or a bounty of record stores on the Canary Islands.

As a teenager, he played punk and hip-hop grooves on the drums, and around then he began experimenting with recording himself — mainly Neptunes-inspired beats he had whipped up and loops he made on cassettes. “I always had a lot of curiosity about the process of recording, without knowing what a producer or an engineer was,” he says. Still, he always knew that he wanted to work in music in some capacity. “I always had it super clear,” he says. “I said it, and people would always laugh at me on my island.”

Eventually Díaz-Reixa moved to Barcelona. Around then, he played a solo gig as El Guincho at an underground Madrid club — with a sampler, a mic and a floor tom with an electronic trigger in tow — that changed his life. Young Turks (now Young)/XL Recordings, the tastemaking U.K. label group home to the likes of Radiohead and The xx, reached out to him on Myspace and signed him to a record deal shortly after, on the strength of that particular show. He began touring the world, and in 2008, he released his second album, Alegranza!, an avant-garde mélange of Tropicália, Afrobeats, looped vocals and other sounds.

Though he found a growing audience, especially in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Mexico, Díaz-Reixa felt like an outsider even within the mid- to late-aughts heyday of inventive indie-pop. “There wasn’t a space for me in that music, nor in hip-hop, because of the themes I touched on,” he says. “I talked about love, identity. So I was in a kind of limbo as an artist. They didn’t know where to put me at festivals.”

In 2010, shortly after releasing his third album, Pop Negro, Díaz-Reixa got a call from Icelandic musician Björk. She wanted to work with him on her forthcoming album, Biophilia, so Díaz-Reixa made the trek to New York from Barcelona for the sessions. During that process, Björk said something that stunned him. “I remember that she told me, ‘You’re a producer.’ ” That didn’t totally sit right with Díaz-Reixa, who recalls thinking, “ ‘I’m an artist.’ ” Around then, his mother was diagnosed with cancer, and in 2012 — the same year he signed a publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music — he returned to the Canary Islands, where he spent a little over two years with her until she died.

When Díaz-Reixa returned to Barcelona, and to music after pausing things for several years, he started reevaluating his career — and realized that Björk had been right: He was meant to be a producer, not an artist. “In truth, what she said made sense,” he says. “Because the part that I’ve most enjoyed is making songs. I liked shows, the connection. But I think my true calling is to spend as much time as possible in the studio, and the least amount of time possible on the other duties as an artist: promotions, doing two interviews a day, touring.” After that, he put together a new album, Hiperasia, that he used to “explore my skills as a producer and see who I was going to be as a producer,” he says. “I used that as a kind of school.”

A few years later, a musician he knew in Barcelona, Rosalía Vila Tobella, invited him to see her perform at a flamenco bar, or tablao. She was singing standards and accompanied by a guitarist, and he remembers being struck by the way she commanded the small room, putting on the type of show that wouldn’t be out of place in a massive stadium. But when Rosalía later reached out to Díaz-Reixa to collaborate, he at first demurred. “Obviously I saw her as a tremendous talent, but I wasn’t sure where I could help,” he says. “She was very traditional in a style of music that I was very ignorant about. So for me it was like, ‘How do I situate myself here?’ ” Once the two of them got to know each other, though, they clicked and started informally making music together.

Those meetups led to Díaz-Reixa eventually helping Rosalía co-write her staggeringly original 2018 album, El Mal Querer, the entirety of which he also produced. He declines to comment more specifically on what he imparted in those sessions, but following the success of the album — and the more he kept producing — he realized that the isolation of his youth translated into a major strength in the studio, in that he looks “in places that the majority of people overlook,” he says. “I’m neither the best instrumentalist nor the best singer. But I do have that little thing that I’m realizing something that, later, will appear in the session.”

That sensibility comes through in how, say, he might suggest a Gucci Mane sample for a Cabello song — which he did for the snippet that ended up undergirding the pop star’s “I LUV IT.” Or the way he subverts traditional song structure. “I always look for the element of surprise to arrive very soon in a song,” he says. “You don’t have to wait 40, 50 seconds until the hook.” Cabello, a fan of Díaz-Reixa’s work with Rosalía, says she found in the studio that Díaz-Reixa “adds that quality of a bloodhound on the hunt for something magical, and he doesn’t settle for anything less.”

While he’s partial to collaborating on full albums like El Mal Querer and C,XOXO, Díaz-Reixa still relishes working with artists on individual songs. Recently he collaborated with Charli XCX on “Everything is romantic,” a sweeping track from her album — and cultural phenomenon — brat. As Díaz-Reixa tells it, Charli already had brat’s campaign carefully defined by the time that, about midway through completing the album, she came to Miami for a week to record with him. Charli had a clear idea about what she wanted this particular song to be: “She had been in Italy with her partner, and she wanted to reflect,” he says. “She had something written, just lyrics.” He adds that she sought out a “grand” opening to the tune, and from there Díaz-Reixa swiftly assembled the piledriving beat at A2F Studios, where “Everything is romantic” came together, along with a few other tracks that didn’t make the final cut.

Regardless of the project, Díaz-Reixa sees his job as a producer to meet artists where they are. “There are artists who have tremendous vision, and tremendous qualities to meet that vision, but they don’t have a way to convert the vision into music,” he says. “Other artists have a lot of qualities as musicians, but they need a bit of vision, or clarity. As a producer — and any colleague of mine would tell you this — what we have to do is just listen.”

Díaz-Reixa’s sought-after production skills, and his ongoing collaborations with boundary-pushing artists, are especially significant given that, for a while, he was a bit of an industry oddball. He stuck to his instincts for elevating music that was important to him — reggaetón, African music and off-kilter electronic music — for years, though it took a while for the world to catch up with him. “As in production, I made music that was kind of strange, indie,” he says. “There wasn’t space for people making music in Spanish with all those influences. Then suddenly, fast-forward 10 years later, that’s mainstream. Suddenly the world let its guard down and said: ‘No, all of these styles of music can be valuable, and they can be a part of a two-and-a-half-minute song that enchants the world.’ ”

His patience has paid off. Díaz-Reixa’s production work has nabbed him five Latin Grammys thus far and an MTV Video Music Award for “Con Altura,” a collaboration between Rosalía and J Balvin. He’s helping mentor the seven writer-producers signed to his label, Rico Publishing. He hasn’t yet sold his production catalog — though he has been approached about it. “It doesn’t interest me,” he says. “It’s not something that I see, for now. Also, when you’re a dad, you see a future there, too,” he adds, explaining that maybe his son could take on managing the catalog one day. More (secret) projects are also in motion. But at this point, Díaz-Reixa insists there’s no particular project or award left on his bucket list.

“Really, the greatest prize of making music is to keep making music,” he says. “My goal is much more artisanal: I love the process, I love to make music, and I want to keep dedicating myself to music — to be within the mystery of music, and to live inside that mystery.”

This article appears in the Oct. 5 issue of Billboard.