COCO & THE FRIQUE

WORM collaborated with deejays and presenters Coco María and Arp Frique, to reinvent the idea of music television on the Boomgaardsstraat.

The concept behind Coco & The Frique was part Public Access TV, part late-night cable talk show, and part legendary music shows like The Tube. Each episode featured interviews and performances by local and international artists, with sketches and animations, and all the regular chaos that today’s slick streaming services fails to provide.

Television is dead, long live the Internet! A slight exaggeration perhaps, but the Internet is permanent and always available, 24 hours a day. The traditional forms of music television (MTV, or in the Netherlands, for example, Vrije Geluiden) are gradually disappearing, but the team felt this kind of show still had a place in the modern world.

Coco & The Frique brought headliner and underground musicians together in a fun and inspiring manner. WORM invited visual and multidisciplinary makers in Rotterdam to help make and direct the shows. New creative relationships blossomed over the year, during the inhouse shows and a residency at Down the Rabbit Hole festival in 2023.   

The process of making TV in these digital times may sound strange. But, in line with WORM’s Open City’s wider brief of collaborating with others to create new forms of cultural production, it created many opportunities for exploring new ideas, and new hybrid kinds of making you’d not normally associate with classic TV.  

Host with the most of Breakfast Club Coco on Worldwide FM, Coco María was raised on Mexico’s fast-moving music scene. She’s a regular at festivals and clubs all over the globe, bringing the energy of the sun with selections from South and Central America, Brazil, the Caribbean. 

Arp Frique brings people, sounds and continents together. His vibrant collective, Arp Frique & Family, have performed throughout Europe and Asia, from the clubs to the big stages such as Lowlands, North Sea Jazz, Dekmantel, Transmusicales, WOMAD and beyond besides playing sessions for KEXP, Radio Nova and many more. 

As the production home for Coco & The Frique, WORM’s wider creative cast included: collaboration on visual, technical and set design by Werner van der Zwan (multimedia artist on cameras, editing), Davids Danoss (multimedia artist on cameras), Matthias Carter (on cameras, titles, visuals), Vincent Denieul (audio), and Ash Kilmartin (artist and Radio WORM programmer as production lead and stage management).

All episodes and trailers episodes of Coco & The Frique can be found on their dedicated youtube channel, with bonus tracks (and extra music videos, unedited interviews and more) added regularly.

Here are two full episodes as an example.

Episode 1 features Japanese trio Kuunatic and Dutch-Surinamese jazz legend Ronald Snijders.

In Episode 2 we hear from Dennis Bovell and Rotterdam’s finest Another Taste plays Mad Honey.