Rising from Montréal’s underground to festivals in Latin America & Europe like Glastonbury, GUAPO’s bass music mixes have ranked #1 worldwide on Mixcloud’s Global Charts. A festival-closing specialist, he is co-founder of Flamingo Funk and hosts radio shows on CKUT 90.3 FM & LaFaceB.Live.
He collaborated with Jean Paul Gaultier, Grammy & Juno-winning artists Youth, Luisito Quintero, Alpha Yaya Diallo, and influential figures such as Suns of Arqa, Adrian Sherwood, and Luke Vibert.
As Composer & Music Supervisor for Film & TV, he was nominated for a Jutra Award and worked for Netflix, Universal & Showcase. These skills led to immersive video performances with pioneers such as Moment Factory, Gridspace and Graphics Emotion.
I began performing live in 1995 and started DJ’ing in 1997. Since then I’ve played countless gigs concerts, festivals and raves across Europe, North America and Latin America. My favorite role is the Festival Closing Set. I’ve done seven so far, and it’s a moment I absolutely thrive in. Here is a manifesto I’ve written on how to perform one properly!
A closing set is about creating a final moment that stands apart from everything that came before. The challenge is that the crowd is exhausted, running on fumes. So like a surprise guest summoned as the orgy is winding down, my mission is to rally the drained masses and spark one last glorious hurrah!
This is playoff DJ’ing: Game 7, overtime, everything left on the dance floor. You need a killer set, but you also have to own the stage. Closing slots are often in daylight—no dramatic lighting or video projections to hide behind. The magic has to come from the music and the sheer force of your stage presence.
Too many DJs take themselves—and the music—far too seriously. They don’t dance. They barely look at the crowd. They forget that a festival is, at its heart, a party. So I make it my mission to ignite the crowd with manic energy—jumping, dancing and shouting while dropping irresistibly funky tunes. To unleash a wild spirit of absurd, anarchic fun.
I happily break the unwritten rules. An antidote to stiff, gatekeeping vibes. I egg the crowd on so we can feed off each other’s energy until everyone lets loose. Let’s get weird. Let’s get silly. Let’s be so alive that Death trembles in fear at the thought of trying to take one of us!
Fair warning: if the audience doesn’t start a mosh pit, I’ll jump into the crowd and start one myself!
Musically, my closing sets are a love letter to sample culture—leaping across genres: 50s rock, soul, Motown, Blues, Disco, Reggae, Hip-Hop, Funk, Balkan, Latin, Punk and Metal mashed together with Ghetto Funk, Breaks, Bass House, UKG, DnB and Swing-n-Bass.
Big sing-along anthems, funky beats and bad-ass bass from the bowels of hell. Ravers often tell me they never truly appreciated Bass Music until they saw me perform—I make it accessible to everyone.
And that’s the ultimate goal of a closing set : uniting every musical faction of the tribe on one dance floor for a final, unforgettable romp… before we pack it all up and return to reality.
Guapo co-founded Flamingo Funk with DJ Melodrastik and they formed alliances with bass music crews in Ottawa & Toronto. Together they booked international headliners like breakbeat icon Krafty Kuts and Swing N Bass label founder Mista Trick to tour in Canada. Guapo had the honour of performing closing sets after both of them.
Guapo’s experience as a composer and music supervisor for Film & TV lets him craft cinematic experiences that go beyond a typical DJ set. He collaborated on immersive performances with innovators like Moment Factory, Gridspace, Mindroots and Graphics Emotion at the Satosphere Dome, Lumifest, La Place des Festivals, Rialto and Festival Nouveau Cinéma.
For Cirque du Soleil’s Terrekarnaval, he created the musical montage for the six-minute “End of the World” sequence and co-ordinated a team of sound designers to enhance the music with custom effects. He was also member of the immersive post-rock band Antennae and the S.A.T. Mix Sessions collective.
In 2004, while composing the score for the film PURE, I remixed a track by Suns of Arqa—pioneers of World Beat and Global Dub. Founded in 1979 in Manchester by Wadada, the band made history on their debut album with producer Adrian Sherwood, fusing Classical Indian raga with dub reggae and helping create an entirely new genre.
The remix led to an invitation to join the band. Over the years I produced twenty tracks with Suns of Arqa, contributing to six albums and performing at major European festivals including Glastonbury (2005 & 2008) and the Télérama Dub Festival in Paris.
Located on a 1000 acre farm in Avalon where the King Arthur & Holy Grail legends originated, Glastonbury features 175,000 spectators and over 100 stages with the biggest artists, bands & DJ’s in the world. It is truly mind blowing!
Peter Gabriel discovered Suns of Arqa in 1982 and invited them to perform at WOMAD. Wadada’s live ensemble included Jamaican dub poet Prince Far-I. SOA went on to collaborate with The Orb, 808 State, Youth, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Zion Train, Muslimgauze, and producer John Leckie.
Leckie—veteran Abbey Road engineer behind iconic albums by Pink Floyd, Radiohead, The Verve, and The Stone Roses—produced the track I remixed, featuring bansuri maestro Raghunath Seth at Gabriel’s Real World Studios.
Back in Montréal, I held auditions and found vocalist Geeta Sparkle. Her soaring voice, Seth’s flute, and my beats and guitar textures created the climactic finale of the film PURE. It was released on the soundtrack CD and on Suns of Arqa’s «Hallucinasia».
For the band’s 25th-anniversary DVD «Hindu Pict», we filmed a live performance of the remix at Montréal’s Société des Arts Technologiques. With immersive visuals by Moment Factory’s VJ Johnny Ranger, the music video he made of our performance went viral drawing over 100,000 views.
Sadly Wadada passed away in 2021 and we never released a full album of our collaborations. I remain grateful to have been part of his extraordinary musical vision that reshaped global fusion music.
As Music Coordinator & DJ for fashion icon JEAN PAUL GAULTIER’S Pinkarnaval and Cirque du Soleil founder GUY LALIBERTÉ’S Terrakarnaval, Guapo played to crowds of over 15,000 spectators in Place Des Festivals during the Just For Laughs festival.
These grandiose parades fused music, fashion & circus arts into unforgettable spectacles featuring over 2000 perfumers. As Music Coordinator he coordinated the composing & recording of all of the original music for these events, which was composed by Quicksound.
Guapo performed the closing sets for both of these festivals. He also booked all the DJ’s & VJ’s on the two stages for the entire run.
For the Bal Du Fin D’un Monde Guapo used his skills as a Film Composer, Music Supervisor and Music Editor to create the soundtrack for the End of the World segment, synchronized to the immersive video projections created by Graphics Emotion that covered the walls of the buildings surrounding the stage.
For the finale night of the Terrakarnaval he coordinated a two hour variety show, The first half featured a performance by Quicksound with 15 time Grammy Award winning Venezuelan percussionist Luisito Quintero (Masters at Work, Tito Puente).
Guapo then delivered the closing set accompanied by the robot dancers of Black Mohawk and acclaimed aerial artist Yammel Caramel. For the video projections he enlisted his most talented collaborators from the S.A.T. Mix Sessions crew : VJ’s Jocool, Liberty and Pink Rubber Lady.
