24 horas

The story behind

Café Tacvba packed a rhythm into 24 horas that doesn't feel like it lasts just two minutes. It sounds as if time had stretched without warning: a drum loop that doesn't fit into four beats, nor five, and a guitar repeating a short pattern until your body feels it before your mind does. It's one of those songs that doesn't ask for permission to stay in your head, as if your brain would rather forget the rest of the album than let go of this fragment.They recorded it in Cuernavaca, Morelos, in a house that wasn't a studio, with equipment that wasn't the best, yet it left behind a raw sound where every instrument feels like it's in the same room. Rubén Albarrán, credited as Cosme, delivered vocals that oscillate between a whisper and a restrained shout, as if the lyrics had slipped out before he could finish them. Gustavo Santaolalla and Café Tacvba themselves shared production duties, and the result is an album that doesn't sound like a rehearsal or an overproduced track, but rather something that emerged from a mistake and ended up being essential. 24 horas isn't the longest track on the Re album, but in those one hundred nineteen seconds, there's more ideas than in many five-minute songs.