Try as you might, you can’t quite pigeonhole Jose Manuel Cerda. It seems easy at first. He wears brooding dark colors, he plays discordant electronic tracks and he has a heady DJ alias: El Sueño de la Casa Propia (“the dream of home ownership”).  He talks about working as a postman, a small time drug dealer and a street vendor before he discovered electronic music.

Running with that, many Latin American journalists have pinned Cerda as some kind of angsty, underground, revolutionary, artistic voice of Valparaiso, his home port city in Chile.

But really, he prefers to think of himself as a working Joe and a family man (he has  a daughter). He didn’t really give much thought to his DJ name and, though he likes his city, he’d live just about anywhere if he had the dough, he told La Pollera.

And I have full faith that his innovative upcoming album, Historial de Caidas will get him there. 

Frankly, his music is just as hard to pin down as he is. Using samples and a laptop, El Sueño creates nonlinear, tense pieces with only subtle structure. You’re never quite sure if you’ve accidentally played the song in reverse.

But he uses poppy, fascinating samples–albeit mashed up and twisted–so you stay hooked by the wild changes instead of getting lost in an ambient experimental haze. El Sueño may be a mad scientist, but he has total control over his diabolical inventions.

You can listen to the entirety of the Historial de Caidas here. The album will be released next month.

Check out his video for “Voluntad de Oro” off the album!

El Sueño de La Casa Propia “Voluntad de Oro” v.2 from simpletv.cl on Vimeo.