Breaking New Ground: CHICA Gang on Inclusive Club Culture
BY Lara Groves
Nestled in the hills of Kobetamendi (Mount Cobetas) in beautiful Basque country, Bilbao BBK Live festival returned for its 15th edition, with 115,000 partygoers treated to a multigenre lineup across three days from July 7-9. Holding the coveted closing set are CHICA Gang, the Madrid and Bilbao-based femme DJ collective on rapid ascendance.
Trippin caught up with Rocio and Alba at the festival to unpack their visual and sonic influences, building a sense of community from the ground up and how they champion diversity wherever they play.
Bilbao is a city that resists singular interpretation. A once-titanic port of industry and commerce, later afflicted by economic decline, has given way to a new artistic powerhouse ere you’ll find Brutalist architecture at the banks of the Rio Neviòn; high-rise tower blocks and port-side cranes crowd rolling hills (greener than you might expect – it rains a lot), all vying for space. The famous Guggenheim Museum’s hard titanium finish, said to reflect the modernist movement’s celebration of industrial life, could just as easily be likened to fish scales. The Guggenheim is totemic for how Bilbao sprang ‘rubies from the rubble’: creative culture becoming the city’s beacon after years of stagnation. Arguably no better demonstration of the plurality of this city than Bilbao BBK Live festival, which assembles legacy heavyweights (this year: LCD Soundsystem, Pet Shop Boys, M.I.A) with fresher faces (Yu Su, Identified Patient, Kelly Lee Owens) for an eclectic musical offering spanning rock, pop, breaks, rap and beyond.
Here to make a splash on the Beefeater stage are CHICA Gang. Garnering attention for their high energy parties, heavily influenced by the sounds of perreo, longtime friends Rocio and Alba came together back in 2017 to “carve out dedicated space” for femme and queer DJs in the Spanish underground scene, which, they tell me, at the time was completely male-dominated. “We realised everywhere we went, we didn’t feel comfortable or safe. We loved music but didn’t have space to enjoy it”. Keen to create a 360°, design-led experience, the pair recently hired Creative Director Caesar “for all things visual and aesthetic” to round out the group. While injecting their love of art, design and fashion, the trio are steadfast in their mission to bring inclusivity to dancefloors in both Bilbao and across Spain.
CHICA Gang’s star is definitely on the ascent: a set at last year’s Boiler Room Festival in Barcelona has amassed over a million views on YouTube. Building in everything from Latin pop to trance when they play, the result is a lurid, spiky, but playful, sound. Rattling off a diverse crew of musical influences, Rocio and Alba cite names like Dean Blunt and DJ Coldsteel, alongside “dear friends” Juguete, Chico Blanco and 8kito, as well as TRONIS, Miravalles, Katza and Amaia Yaniz, who makeup some of the latest names in Bilbao talent.
Past projects have seen them work with the likes of Fatima, Bossy Ldn and Princess Nokia. In addition to like-minded female artists, the girls also take inspiration from the women in their lives: “We didn’t even know how to DJ when we started the collective! We learnt thanks to other female DJ friends” CHICA Gang emphasise how important it is to build a community first, as a safe space to express and explore your artistry. Beyond this mission, the girls have worked closely with Caesar to hone their aesthetic vibe, building - as they see it - “the CHICA Universe”, heavily settled around contemporary culture and a club imaginary, favouring exciting “3D elements that we like and that inspire us” and help construct that immersive experience. A vision that feels very at home in a city like Bilbao.
Visitors to Spain have come to expect Madrid and Barcelona as big touchstones for club culture. But Rocio and Alba tell me that people flocking to Bilbao for its art scene, should stay for its nightlife. It may not be fully on the map yet, but Rocio and Alba tell me it has a lively underbelly: “Bilbao has one of the best crowds that we’ve encountered, the energy of the people completely matches ours – it’s pretty unique!”. They note that the city has embraced a “punk, anti-systems” outlook, with the eclecticism of events like BBK Live helping to push that narrative.
Rocio has recently moved to the city, hoping to bring CHICA energy to Spain’s north east corner and offering her praise to longer term residents that have helped blaze the trail for Bilbao by pushing the boundaries of the scene for years. Bilbao, she says, always defies expectations and does things differently: “and there are lots of new artists, DJs and promoters doing great stuff, always underground but always for everybody. I feel very welcome and embraced here”
CHICA Gang are currently touring across Spain, playing seminal events like this year’s Sónar Festival in Barcelona. In May, they put on their own CHICA Festival night at the Teatro Eslava, “including artists like Casual Gabberz, Sentimental Rave and horsegiirL” CHICA Gang’s M.O is fostering a safe, inclusive space for women, marginalised genders and the queer community. “We started doing parties for this reason” they both agree, and have always been “super vocal” on this point. How do they make sure this mission translates wherever they play, including at Bilbao BBK Live? “We’ve always had a strong feminist message and people have related our parties and sets to this beliefs, so now, everywhere we go we take that essence with us and people know what’s up at our sets” Rocio and Alba’s work in this space has shone a light on some of the exclusionary attitudes at the centre of clubbing in Spain, and has helped create space for others to follow: CHICA Gang tell me that many people are starting their own collectives with a similar mission, which has propelled them to keep the party going.
In early Sunday morning at BBK, Caesar shows off the fruits of his labour as CHICA Gang’s signature moving coin graphic looms large over a lively crowd and keeps pace with the girls’ trance-inflected sound. In subversive Bilbao, artists like CHICA Gang are moving the dial toward a new music culture that embraces people at the margins. But, as the girls observe, the work doesn’t stop here:
“We may change our way of DJing, our repertoire, we might even change music styles, but we never change our way of seeing the world, and we will always take that with us.”
