Diveese Names, Deeds

Even by the eclectic standards of rock en espanol, Illya Kuryaki & the Valderramas have a sound best described as wildly kaleidoscopic.

The Argentine group--whose core members, Dante Spinetta and Emmanuel Horvilleur, have been friends since childhood--will play Sunday at J.C. Fandango in Anaheim on a tour supporting the group’s fourth studio album, “Versus.”

The record is one of the most daring efforts in recent Latin rock, a “box of dreams,” as the band calls it, that’s equal parts spiritual rap opera and testosterone-charged funk manifesto.

Songs include a dizzying number of musical and lyrical references, from a nod to Hong Kong actor Chow Yun Fat to American rap idioms mixed with invented words in Spanglish. There’s a unifying concept of Klama Hama, a fictional dreamland of feverish, erotic encounters.

“We wanted to do a more quiet record this time around,” Spinetta said in a phone interview from his home in Buenos Aires, “an album about dreams, sex and fantasy. That’s how we came up with Klama Hama, which is something like the place of your ultimate dreams, a landscape where anything can happen. We wanted the listener . . . to take a trip with us.”

If the “Versus” experience is overwhelming at first, it becomes even more so when you learn that Spinetta is 21, Horvilleur 23. In addition to composing the material, singing it and playing most of the instruments, the two produced the album.

“We think of the production as the wardrobe, the clothes that you can fit on a song,” Spinetta said. “You can go into so many different directions, and that’s the fun part of it. That’s why we produce the records ourselves.”

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Blame some of their precociousness on heredity. Spinetta is the son of Luis Alberto Spinetta, one of Argentina’s most revered rock en espanol veterans, who, in the late ‘60s founded the seminal group Almendra and has since enjoyed a prolific career both as a solo artist and as a member of various bands.

Growing up together, Spinetta said, he and Horvilleur “started doing a lot of break-dance in the late ‘80s. Once, I won a break-dance championship in order to pick up a girl. And because of the music we would listen to, we started rhyming at a very young age.”

Understandably, music was ever present in their homes. “We listened to everything: Earth, Wind & Fire, Steely Dan, Prince, Al Jarreau and, of course, the Beatles. When Run-D.M.C. came out, it just blew us away,” Spinetta said.

“Then we discovered the roots of rap, listening to a lot of funk: Parliament, the Ohio Players,” he said. “And then we started learning how to play some instruments, because we admired Prince so much, how he had an absolute control over everything he did.”

Although the most pastoral, idyllic side of “Versus” bears the stamp of Spinetta senior, there’s no attempt on Illya Kuryaki & the Valderramas’ part to cash in on its pedigree. In fact, the younger Spinetta didn’t mention his famous father once during the interview for this story.

Onstage, the group can be misinterpreted because of its antics. At times, Spinetta and Horvilleur speak to the audience in perfectly imitated Mexican accents, when it is obvious they are from Argentina, where people speak with a cadence that usually sounds more like Italian than Spanish.

“We never mock anybody,” explained Spinetta, “because we can learn something from everybody. But our rapping includes many different styles and languages. We also grew up with Cheech and Chong, Santana, Edward James Olmos. We are not Mexican, but we feel we are part of la raza.”

The duet’s reputation as a rap act can also be misleading. Whereas both performers do devote a healthy percentage of their live acts to energetic rapping, a record such as “Versus” is filled with many other influences. (The creamy “Discovery Buda,” for instance, sounds like a Spanish outtake from Prince’s “Diamonds and Pearls” sessions.)

“We really try not to get stuck in any specific genre,” Spinetta said. “Even within this record, there’s a whole bunch of different styles, as we let all of the influences we grew up with flow freely. We never say, ‘This is going to be a rap record,’ or something like that. But the unifying thread in everything we do is funk.”

Indeed, the group’s biggest strength is its ability to juxtapose many contrasting styles in a single record, which helps explain its striking moniker, inspired by that of Illya Kuryakin, one of the agents from the 1960s TV spy series “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”

“[That] represents the Anglo influence in us. And ‘El Pibe’ Valderrama, the famous Colombian soccer player, symbolizes the black and Latino side of us,” Spinetta said. “That’s exactly what we are, a complete mixture of different things.”

* Illya Kuryaki & the Valderramas will play Sunday at J.C. Fandango, 1086 N. State College Blvd., Anaheim. 11 p.m., doors open at 9. $13. (714) 758-1057.