LOS MITICOS DEL RITMO (Soundway Records, 2012)

I've just bought this album twice. I first bought it digitally and after just one listen I was like, what have I done? I didn't need this one in fucking MP3!  What was I thinking? I desperately need this on vinyl, like, now! So I just went and ordered a vinyl copy to add to my collection, and since it comes from Soundway, I'm pretty sure it's gonna include one of those free download cards which I won't be needing and I'll probably end up giving away.
Quantic has become the biggest name in current Latin music that mainstream Latinos still no nothing about. He's right at the center of that paradox, the Latin-music-for-non-Latinos-done-or-curated-by-non-Latinos paradox that fascinates me so much. Meaning he's the leader in introducing non-Latinos all over the world to Latin-but-cool music while the average Latinos out there are stuck listening to cheesy ass bachata and reggaetón or trying to emulate, in Spanish, whatever is the current trend of the Anglo pop/rock/rap music word.
In a way Quantic, with his super prolific body of work and his many simultaneous side-projects, is kind of creating a new canon for Latin music from a gringo perspective that pretty much ignores all the trends that dominate the Latin American airwaves, but it's still very well grounded in the real roots of some of the best (and sometimes sadly forgotten) Afro-Latin music.
I wonder what would be like to see the Latin music universe exclusively through Quantic's telescope. I guess it looks something like an alternate reality where the funkier, soulful side of Afro-Latin music survived the '70s and remained dominant during the following decades oblivious to all the cheesy crap that came after. I too wish I could live in that fantasy world, but I am Latino and I grew up in Latin America surrounded by all that corny ass shit and I grew up hating Latin music because of that crap, so even if now I love some aspects of it, I still feel compelled to make fun of it.
Quantic never feels the need of making fun of the kitsch side of it because he sees it from an outsider perspective and he's able to focus on only the cool stuff while ignoring the overwhelming surroundings. And I think that's his biggest advantage when he approaches Latin music and that's why at the ond of the day, he being from the UK, ends up situating himself as one of the most important figures in current Latin music world wide.
This is his second full length album this year (the one with Alice Russell just came out weeks ago) and we are still looking forward for the upcoming Ondatropica double (or triple?) album he's dropping this summer with Frente Cumbiero and a bunch of top-notch guests. There's a lot of expectation for that project. That's probably gonna be a game-changer and maybe will end up crossing over and finally introducing Quantic's fabulous music to the average Latinos out there. In the meantime, Los Míticos Del Ritmo is a nice collection of dancefloor-oriented all-instrumental cumbias, some of which will definitely become mandatory visitis in all my future DJ sets.

More info HERE.

CONGO SANCHEZ-T.E.T.O./Oleada Calor (ESL, 2012)

Regardless of what his name might suggest, Congo Sanchez is not really latino (maybe if he was, he'd know to spell his last name the proper way, Sánchez) but his music (somewhere in between funk and dub with an emphasis on percussion) has definitely some Afro-Latin elements. Hence, his debut release deserves a mention in The Hard Data. Especially because there's a 7'' single version going around and as y'all know I'm a big supporter of this specific format. 

I only knew about Congo Sanchez for his collaborations with DC's Los Empresarios but it seems like the guy has a pretty busy schedule contributing to the back-beat of many other high profile DC-based projects, including Thievery Corp., See-I and my personal favorites The Funk Ark. Then, somehow, he found some spare time to put out a humble EP as a solo artist, simply titled Vol. 1 and this 7'' single includes two of the tracks off that EP. I played it in my early warm-up set last weekend and it sounded great. These are subtle chill-mood grooves, very much in tune with the ESL catalog, Thievery fans will be pleased. I like it, but I'd much rather see him doing something more dancefloor-igniting, leaning more heavily into the funk side of it, you know, something that would feel at home in Fort Knox Recordings. 

Anyway, it's a great positive sign that ESL is still putting out vinyl, considering they have been releasing a lot of very interesting stuff recently that definitely deserves to be pressed in this format. I'm talking about The Funk Ark, Novalima and Afrolicious.   

Buy it HERE.

REMOLINO DE ORO (Domino Sound, 2012)

This obscure New Orleans-based record label specialized on reissues and compilations of old, weird, foreign stuff on vinyl, released a first cumbia collection a couple of years ago. This is like the sequel.
When I say obscure label, I mean, they are either too old school or they wanna play the secretive game and keep it in the DL. I could not find a website anywhere, no mention of them on the usual social networks, even finding a decent quality image of the record cover on google took me a long time. So I don't know if they are just not internet savvy, or they simply play a complete different game of promotion that I don't understand. But somehow their albums get out there, in abundant quantities, and probably that's all that matters to them, and relying on word of mouth.
Anyhow, this is simply another compilation of golden-age Discos Fuentes stuff. Classic northern Colombian dancefloor tracks from the cumbia family, heavy on the percussion (plenty of breaks) and with great quality mastering. Some of the tracks are all-time favorites that many vinyl cumbia collectors might already have from the classic 14 Cañonazos series from the '60s and early '70s, but it's worth having them in this clean remastered versions if just for DJing purposes only. These are accordion-ridden cumbias by the true legends, like Andrés Landero and Calixto Ochoa from that era before big band brass arrangements started to bring cumbia closer to the salsa format and arguably making it cheesier. I only wish they included some liner notes or something.
On a side note, the cover collage art used the photo from the classic ¡Nos Fuimos! by Los Corraleros De Majagual, the same one that inspired me to name Bondi Blaster's debut EP ¡Lo' Juimo! I always loved that cover.

LOS TRANSATLANTICOS-First Trip (BBE, 2012)

I'm dead serious here: this is some next level shit. I can't remember the last time I got a CD in the mail of an artist I didn't know anything about, without any expectations at all put it in the CD player and had my head blown off in a matter of seconds.
I was planning to do some home chores and have this playing as background and that task became simply impossible to achieve. I was instantly compelled to sit down in the sofa in front of the sound system and try to absorb and digest this album in the fullest. I even went back and replayed it from the beginning. And I even had to force myself to stay put, because my instinct, after listening only to the first two tracks was to run to my computer and write a laconic review: this is the best thing ever, period.
Los Transatlánticos is a project by a Croatian-by-the-way-of-Berlin producer and his Colombian friend working from both sides of the Atlantic and finding a common ground in Afro-tropical rhythms with a reggae dub feel. The result is, simply put, the future in ñu-cumbia and electropical music. And the bass, oh, that bass, man, it's MASSIVE. I almost never write words in all caps so you know when I do is because I really mean it. This is no fucking joke, the low frequencies on this album are so dope that they made me wanna go back and re-record all my Bondi Blaster album, if only I knew how to do that. Los Transatlánticos is like the best of Bomba Estéreo, Systema Solar and Sidestepper mixed together and mashed up over some transglobal über-deep bass with a surprise middle-eastern twist.
As if that wasn't enough to get you'll hyped up, the album comes with two bonus tracks, remixes they did for Colombia's Systema Solar and La 33.
Man, today is my birthday and this is, so far, the only gift I've got and let me tell you, I'm done. I don't need anything else. Thank you BBE for releasing this and for sending me a promo. Only one little request, please, pretty-please, press (at least some singles of) this on vinyl, I desperately need to play it on my sets.

The album will be released in May, 2012, keep and eye on BBE's website for news.

MATI ZUNDEL-Amazónico Gravitante (ZZK/Waxploitation, 2012)

A few weeks ago I interviewed Mati Zundel for Remezcla.com. Usually, when I do something like that, I don't do an album review on my blog because I don't wanna repeat myself. I mean, everything that I wanted you to know about this new album is pretty mucho covered in that friendly conversation we had on skype with one of the few ZZK Records' artists that I haven't met in person yet.
One thing that wasn't mentioned on that interview, however, is the fact that the album was going to be released on double vinyl LP format. That I didn't know, otherwise, obviously, I would've pointed it out, being the vinyl fiend that I am.
I didn't know that until last week and as soon as I found out I ran to buy my copy (and I strongly suggests you do the same if you haven't done so yet). I had previously purchased the album digitally so I ended up paying for it twice (also, in between those to events, I got a promo free download from the label). But this didn't bother me at all, because Mati Zundel's debut album is my favorite album of 2012, so far. Now it's part of the elitist list of albums that I bought twice (in two different formats) next to Gotan Project's La Revancha del Tango and M.I.A.'s Arular (there're definitely a few more on that list but I can't come up with their names in this precise moment and I'm not gonna go check).
Anyway, I just wanted to share with you the happiness that I experienced finding out that ZZK was back in full force after a year-long semi-hiatus and thanks to their recent deal with US-based Waxploitation they have gone back to pressing vinyl. That means that my "wishful thinking" of my previous ZZK review is actually going to become a reality and I'll finally be able to play all those tracks on my DJ sets. Yay!

Order your copy HERE.

BATIDA-Batida (Soundway, 2012)

And right here we have a solid contender to enter the top-11 list of the best albums of 2012. Yes I know it's too early for predictions of that kind, but I'm pretty confident about this release. Not only the great music, but the whole creative concept behind it is great and most importantly, the significance of it: just the fact that this is Soundway's first release of a current artist, as opposed to their usual reissues of obscure dug-out gems from the past, that in itself is a great sign, specially considering the high standards of Soundway releases and top-quality pressings of vinyl. This release is simply opening the doors to many more of the kind that will definitely come to fill my crates and be always handy when DJing a vinyl set.
What's Batida? You wonder. Well basically it's some DJ in Portugal taking the kuduro concept to the next level: to its imaginary past roots. Yes, he creates kuduro beats using samples from the analog era of African music, before they started using ringtone sounds, and the results are nothing short of amazing.
I don't really know where I'm gonna mix this in my regular sets, because they rarely go higher than 130BPM, butI think I'll be able to figure something out and make a worthy exception for this. But I simply just bought this to support this promising new phase of Soundway Records and wish them the best of lucks because I know for sure there's plenty more dope shit like this that they can release on those beautiful carefully-packed collectible records they put out. Coming up next, Quantic's newest project, Los Míticos del Ritmo, can't wait.

Order your copy HERE, or find it at your local record store.

LATIN CONCRETE-Mixed and compiled by Chris Read (BBE, 2012)

Just a few months ago I reviewed a 7'' single by Chris Read, a British hip-hop DJ who, like many others in the Anglo-Saxon music world, got fairly recently introduced to cumbia and decided to make his own experiments with it, sampling it and mixing it with some b-boy-friendly hard-hitting funky break beats.
On this occasion he takes his newly found love for Latin music a step further, compiling a selection of Latin flavored funky tracks and mixing them into a solid hour-long DJ set.
Latin Concrete is a double CD with the mixed set on one disc and the separate full tracks on another one. Now this is not a digger's comp in the sense that he didn't go deep into the surviving record stores of South America trying to find obscure gems from the past and exposing them for the first time to the rest of the world like his fellow countryman Quantic has been doing. Most of these tracks are actually very well known by DJs who've been spinning soulful Latin music for the last decade or so, since all of them had been released within that period by either US or Europe-based labels. I already had many of them in constant rotation on my vinyl DJ sets. Some of them could even be considered sort of common place by now, or at least modern classics (Quantic & Nickodemus' "Mi swing es tropical"). Which leads me to believe that this is not a compilation targeting hardcore diggers or genre-specific DJs (is not even going to be released on vinyl). Instead it's targeting the Northern Hemisphere cats who, like Chris Read himself, have an interest in expanding their sound palette by incorporating Latin beats, while this is not necessarily  their area of expertise.
What I find the most interesting about this comp, besides the fact that I love 90% of the tracks selected (and if you don't have them yet, this is a great chance to get them because they are all must-haves), is the foreigner point of view at selecting and mixing Latin music. Some purist would argue that this is "Latin music for gringos" not for the authentic Latin crowd and there's definitely some truth in there (I'd never play this at a mainstream Latin party full of reggaetoneros and salseros, they wouldn't get it).
Read, not being Latino himself and not having a cultural background that connects him to this music, perceives no sociological prejudice attached to the songs (as in "this song is for rich snobs, that song is for poor uneducated people" "this is cool, this is ghetto") nor does he embeds any nostalgic value in it (as in "this song reminds me of high-school, or that TV show, or my crazy lesbian aunt"). So his criteria is purely based on the dopeness of the beats--he most probably doesn't even understand the lyrics and it doesn't matter either. All that, if you ask me, plays to his advantage here.
Like I mentioned on the review I wrote for his single, I didn't grow up immersed in Latin music either, so I pretty much share a lot of his criteria. Even though I was born and raised in South America and Latin music (cumbia in particular) was always there every time I got on the bus or I went to a quinceañera party,  I was never a fan and that's because like many (most?) other kids my generation I grew up with a distinctive anglophile taste in music. I grew up convinced that Latin music was for hicks and that people with a sophisticated music palate had to always look up to what was cooking in the British isles. So maybe my early musical influences as a teenager are not at all dissimilar to Chris Read's. I spent most of my teenage years and my early twenties absorbed by hip-hop culture and the idea of using hip-hop as a foundation to explore old-school Latin music didn't fully come up to me until I moved to the US at age 25 and I started seeing Latin music from a outsider point of view (and finding joy in exposing its inner kitschness by recontextualizing it).
There's always gonna be some narrow-minded purists and politically motivated assholes who dismiss this sort of compilations saying that the DJ is not Latino and most of the performers aren't even Latinos (Quantic, Beatfanatic, The Juju Orchestra, The GRC) and accuse this of some sort of "cultural appropriation." But how is this different from us, kids in Argentina, back then trying to emulate the Manchester sound en español? It is not. Music is universal and the traffic of influences in the global era goes both ways and I'd even argue that some of the best cumbias in the last decade were recorded by British artists (Ska Cubano, Up, Bustle & Out) and if it wasn't for this new-found love in Latin music by these supposedly culturally imperialistic Anglo-Saxon overlords a lot of really cool Central and South American stuff would have remained almost absolutely inaccessible to the world. So I applaud this release and I hope for many similar more from BBE Music, a label that's a favorite among all  true beat connoisseurs. I just wish next time they dig deeper into more obscure stuff (surprise me!) and press it on vinyl.

To be released 4/30/12, order it HERE

Future Sounds of Buenos Aires (ZZK/Waxploitation, 2012)

If when reading the playlist for this compilation you felt like you had deja vu, don't panic, it wasn't a glitch in the matrix.
As you may already know if you follow ZZK records, the Argentina-based ñu-cumbia label recently struck a deal with Waxploitation for their current and upcoming international releases and well, apparently Waxploitation decided to start from a clean slate, act like nobody ever heard of ZZK previous releases and introduce them to the world through this compilation that's sort of a Best Of ZZK Records.
But don't be too quick to dismiss this completely. There are actually a handful of new, unreleased tracks that's definitely worth adding to your collection. I'm talking about the Frikstailers' "Guacha" for example (my favorite of the whole collection) or La Yegros' debut for ZZK records with "Viene de mi". There are a few more that I don't remember from the top of my head and they were all very consistent with the high standards of quality that distinguish the label overall and they all became instant additions to my digital DJ set playlist.
The rest, however, as I mentioned before, are repeats and if you follow this blog I will go ahead and assume you probably have them all, or at least most of them. Some of them you may even have them double-repeated! Such is the case of Fauna's "Hongo x Hongo," which was included in that tribute album to Agrupación Mamanis a couple of years ago and then again on Fauna's second album Manshines. Another example is Chancha Via Circuito's "Prima," previously included in ZZK Sound Vol. 2 and later again in Chancha's Rio Arriba.
What this clearly indicates is that this is not meant to be taken as the highly awaited third volume of the ZZK Sound compilation that started it all and it's definitely not targeting the niche of those who have been following the ñu-cumbia scene since its inception (for whom the word "future," in the title, might sound a little off). What this new comp is trying to do is, as I exposed earlier, introduce these amazing artists to a whole new audience and revive the momentum of the ñu-cumbia movement worldwide. And I really hope they succeed in that enterprise.
Or, there's another possibility and this is just speculation, or more accurately wishful thinking: maybe this compilation is to be released as a double-LP vinyl in which case, everything I wrote above is to be totally dismissed because if there's something I desperately need is those tracks on vinyl to be able to play them in my "real" DJ sets, and with the exception of Chancha's "Prima" I don't think any of the rest had ever been pressed in that format. I'll cross my fingers.

Future Sound Of Buenos Aires drops worldwide May 1st.

DJ DUS-Pussy Marijuana Cumbow (BSTRD Boots, 2011)

I didn't find out about this record's existence until last week when I bought it. I guess it's because of the secretive nature of bootlegs that they don't get good promotion, because I'm more than familiar with DJ Dus and with the label, in fact I'm a fan of both.
Anyway, as you know, I review any new stuff that comes out on 7'' vinyl and falls under the Latin category, particularly when they go into cumbia's territory.
This 45RPM single has on the A side a bootlegged remix of Brazilian Girls reggae tune "Pussy" which totally reminded me of a time when I used to listen to Brazilian Girls quite a lot and then I was like, what ever happened, why did I stopped? Do they still exists? And other questions like that. But the question that became the most prevalent was: Why would somebody do a remix of this particular song... now? And why would it deserve to be pressed on this format? Because, in my narrow world-view, that band and that song had been out of the popularity radar for a while, since like what, five, six year ago? I don't even remember.
What a weird choice for a remix, I thought, and then while re-watching the video on youtube I found out that the song had actually been recently appropriated by a douchebag rapper who made it the chorus of his hit "Pussy Marijuana." Now I've never heard about this David Sebastian dude before, and that's for a reason, I don't follow current radio crap, I mean rap. I stopped doing that when 50 Cents came out in 2001 with his first hit single and I never went back to commercial rap music again--specially not since Kanye West made it acceptable to go around calling yourself a rapper when you have the most wack-ass lazy flow and you make words rhyme with the same exact words, or you just don't bother rhyming at all, like this dude Sebastian did a few times on that Pussy song right before I felt compelled to turn it off halfway through because it drives me so fucking mad to see how wack is the rap teenagers nowadays listen to.
So my assumption is that DJ Dus decided to make a remix of the original Brazilian Girls tune because this idiot with a mic made the song popular again. OK, I still hate the rap version but I still love the original version a lot more, so any reason is a good reason to bring it back.
The B-Side is a lot more obvious of a choice, he simply made a remix of a Colombian classic cumbia by the king himself Andrés Landero. It's a simply remix, just adding a strong back beat and locking the BPM to ensure maximum mixability, even stretching the exit by looping the last bar. It works out great and it will surely become a mandatory visit in all my future DJ sets.

Buy it HERE.

SENSACIÓN SHIPIBO-Reshin Noma/Amakashin Amawe (Masstropicas, 2011)

The cumbia universe is filled with absurd, bizarre, ridiculousness, kitsch and absolute lack of regard for anything that resembles a conventional sense of taste. That's part of its charm, especially when taken out of context and viewed through the prism of irony. Of course there's the whole other side of the story, the deep African diaspora roots and the contagious funky beats.
Cumbia new fans, the ones who didn't necessarily grow up in a cumbiero environment (myself included) have probably arrived to it enticed by either one of those two factors, or a combination of both.
Then you have Michael Pigott of Masstropicas, a vinyl (and cassette) record label out of Massachusetts that started releasing reissues and is now also including newly recorded original material in their slowly by steadily expanding catalog. This guy's interest in cumbia, Peruvian cumbia in particular, is a total mystery to me.
Unlike most other gringos who fell under the chichadelic spell in recent years, Michael doesn't go for the funkier side of chicha that appeals to the soulful break beat-digging heads and DJs out there. And when it comes to the kitsch and the bizarre, he goes beyond the imaginable and taps into flat-out crazy territory, with no apparent ironic intermediation. He somehow managed to extract some of the strangest expressions off the fringes of Peruvian pop culture and instead of laughing at it, like the millions of people mocking Wendy Sulca on youtube, he seems to actually, genuinely, enjoy it.
I used to think he was just another gringo who went down to the Amazonian jungle to experience ayahuasca and after a mind-distorting psychedelic trip came back obsessed with chicha music and Peruvian aboriginal culture. Now I'm pretty sure his connection to it goes way deeper, but I still don't quite understand it.
Sensación Shipibo's 7'' vinyl single on Masstropicas is some of the strangest Latin American music you would expect to find pressed in this particularly expensive to produce format. And that's evidence that this guy must really, really love this music, unless he's an eccentric millionaire looking for more imaginative ways to waste money, which I doubt.
It's obviously not chicha. Not at least in the classic sense of it, established (for most of us outside Peru) by the reissues and compilations of Barbés and Vampisoul. Neither it's huayno. It's a peculiar brand of cumbia that's noticeably detached from the Afro-Colombian roots of the genre (as it is detached from any other known branch of modern or traditional cumbia), probably because of it developing in almost absolute isolation from the rest of the world, in some tiny-ass extremely poor town in the middle of the jungle. The lyrics (recorded with lots of delay) include some verses in Spanish but most of it is delivered in the singer's native language, and according to Michael himself, under the influence of ayahuasca rituals (the band's leader is also a shaman).
Of course the music is trippy as fuck, but not in the sense most would probably expect. It still has a kind of up-tempo party vibe. But strictly from a DJ point of view, I'd think it twice before dropping these tracks in my set unless I'm confronted with a very open-minded mixed crowd and they are totally fucked up and is very late in the night. The average Latino party crowd won't get it and even the Peruvians that come to my gigs would probably feel embarrassed. That being said, if you have the right audience at the right time and you are pretty confident you're in the zone and you have them eating them from your palm, drop this shit and it's dancefloor chaos guaranteed.
Needless to say, if you're down for the completely unconventional I strongly suggest you get one of the limited copies of this release as soon as you can. If you were looking for some ñu-cumbia dance-floor-smashing hit to please the hipster crowd, probably look somewhere else.

This 7'' single is exclusively sold as part of a set along with an LP by Los Jharis de Ñaña. Get it here.

BANG DATA-La Sopa (Rockolito Music, 2012)

Bang Data's debut album finally came out and if you're from around here, you probably know this very well because these guys are like everywhere, but I have a feeling people in other latitudes are not as familiar.
Full disclosure, I can't be too hard on them when criticizing their music because these guys are almost like family to me. Not in the sense that we share the same last name (which leads to a lot of funny confusion) but in the sense that I've known them for  many years, we've shared the stage more than a few times and we always, always run into each other in the Bay Area scene. They are mad cool, except for the bassist who hits on my wife when he gets drunk, JK. Besides, the album is plagued with guests who are also very familiar (to me at least), like my colleague El Kool Kyle (who produced the beats on the cumbia tracks) and Chile's DJ Julicio (who did the scratching on a couple of tracks and is the scratch DJ of one of Chile's hip-hop biggest MC's: Zaturno). So yeah, the album has that feeling of family reunion, around a table with some hearty bowls of soup.
La Sopa includes those same songs from their debut EP from 2009, plus many new ones, encompassing all sounds and traditions from the Latin American palette, from Afro-Peruvian, to Brazilian, passing through rock, rap, reggae, ska and the omnipresent cumbia. The bilingual flow of Nicaraguan rapper Deuce Eclipse works out great over those eclectic beats but he doesn't take away the spotlight from the music, this is not a hip-hop album. Rapping is there all over La Sopa, from the first to the last song, but the main ingredient of the soup is the confluence of musical styles and the uplifting international party atmosphere. The production by Peruvian Juan M. Caipo (the fact that the producer's name is Juan and the band's last name is Data has been the source of most of those aforementioned funny confusions) is very detail-attentive, although his rock-en-español background permeates into the band's sound a little too much, but that's just my personal preference (I'm a beat-head, I would've like to see more involvement of Amp Live) and I'm sure plenty other Latinos out there are gonna disagree with me on that and welcome Bang Data as the current leaders of Latin Alternative made in the US.

Available now on iTunes, Amazon, Emusic, etc.  CD's coming up soon.

DIGGING: Even more 45's for y'all!

Like I promised, here's the second batch of 45's, trying to catch up with my avid collecting. Unlike many other jealous DJs and collectors I rather share my finds with the world, specially since most of this is rare, hard to find and/or out of print music that you'll probably won't find very easily on the internet. I do it out of genuine love and respect, but also, as usual, making fun of the bizarre aspects of it. Unfortunately I'm not a connoisseur when it comes to most of these artists, so most of my writing is bullshit and speculation. And as I always say, if somebody with the right knowledge about these tunes is out there reading, please feel free to correct my ignorant rants and illuminate us all.

AFROSOUND-"La Gozadera"/"Pa Ti Mami" (Discos Fuentes, 1974): I'm pretty sure Afrosound will always and forever be my favorite cumbia act to ever come out of Colombia. And they are definitely the funkiest of them all. They took note from the Peruvian chicha guitar, and added to it some major groove and better percussion and goddammit shit's funky! If you're only gonna save one of the 7'''s  out of this batch, make it this one. "La Gozadera" starts up with a funky beat at 108BPM  while there's a bunch of people laughing in the room and then all of a sudden changes gears and shifts to 117BPM with some addictive cumbia beat and it's all dance frenzy until the end. The flip-side is also quite funky, has some interesting breaks and the beat is pretty much locked in 101 throughout the track. No filler here, all killer.

PAPI BRANDAO Y SU CONJUNTO-"Margarita Vargas"/"Tiempo de Cometas" (Brandao, date unknown): Some old-school Panamanian cumbias here by Papi Brandao, who some of you may know from the Panama! compilations by Soundway (at least that where I know him from). Side A is an odd cumbia with a female singer doing some really strange super-high pitch unintelligible singing. On the flip-side we have Mr. Brandao himself getting on the mic for a mellow, nostalgic accordion driven paseo. Both have a very distinctive country-side folklore feeling, characteristic of that era before cumbia migrated to the cities.

CHICO CHE Y LA CRISIS-"El Mundial De Chico Che" (Ariola, 1986): 1986 was the year Mexico hosted the World Cup (won by Argentina, by the way) so I bet there were plenty of commercial recordings that year talking about football and the cup and this one was just one of them. Chico Che was the first artist I ever featured on a digging-related post on this blog, I didn't know much about him back then. Apparently he was a lovable character in Mexican pop culture throughout the '80s and cumbia was the main style in his repertoire, but not the only one. I personally wouldn't dare label this one here under cumbia and I'd never play it in my sets, but still, it's pretty funny, in a kitsch, bizarre way. I specially like the last half with the announcer talking over the music and introducing the band as a football team. The b-side was just flat out horrible, so I'll spare you the pain and skip it.

LA ALONDRA INTERIORANA-"La Jorobaita" (Artelec, date unknown): Another countryside cumbia from Panama. Very little info on this one, sorry, and the recording sounds pretty crappy too. It must be really old. The lyrics (again with a hight pitch female voice) are really hard to understand but from what I can make out, and the title, the song is about an old humpback woman who comes and goes flying so I don't know if it's a figurative speech, or some farmer's legend, or they're just tripping they balls off. The b-side (not included here because of the extreme poor quality of the recording) is a very strange rhythm described as mejorana zapateada, with the beat done with shoe tapping and it's titled "The Diabolical." I guess this must be some voodoo macumba witchcraft shit.

PEDRO LAZA Y SUS PELAYEROS-"El Chicharrón"/"La Panadera"(Discos Fuentes, date unknown): Feeling hungry? Here you have two golden-age Colombian cumbias about food. One is about fried pork skins with hair. Yeah, pretty gross. But he doesn't dive into the subject until the second half of the song, the first half is all instrumental beauty. The other one a lot more upbeat and it about the bread that this one specific woman makes that everybody loves, even the kids. I'm like, dude, all kids love bread! When was the last time you tried to feed a kid something other than cheese or bread? Anyway, I was secretly hopping there was some hidden meaning, you know, like maybe in Colombia bread was slang for pussy or something, but I'm pretty sure he's very much literal and is actually talking about mundane bread.

TERESIN JAEN Y SU CONJUNTO-"Cariñito Verdadero"/"Virgen Del Carmen" (Discoteca Kathia, date Unknown): Back to Panama and the countryside cumbias with colorful record labels. This one says El Rey (The King) and I don't know if that's the artist, the label or what. Anyway both cumbias here are very up-tempo and heavy on the accordion, but the vocals are recorded with a lot or reverb with make them really annoying and hard to understand. Once again, I have little to no idea what the fuck they're talking about, but I don't think it matters, it's Teresin's accordion here who takes all the spotlight and the vocals are just one instrument more in the mix.

LIBERACION-"La Burbuja" (Disa, date unknown): Why the fuck is this called "La Burbuja" I have no idea. Doesn't make any sense, but who cares the track sucks anyway. I once gave away on this blog another track by Liberación that was the absolute dopeness, a cumbia version they did of "The Pink Panther Theme," a record that I play at pretty much all my sets. So I bought this hopping it was equally great and now I'm wondering if it's even the same band, or maybe somebody else with the same name. Oh well, at least they don't sing much, that's the only plus. The flip-side was seriously damaged so couldn't be ripped, but don't worry, it was probably worst than this one.

LOS LIDERES-"La Lira"/"Taka Taka" (Peerless, 1973): Al Verlane's "Taka Takatá" was a hit in the summer of 1972 in Europe and many places of Latin America and it was covered numerous times in different music styles, from symphonic to flamenco to cumbia. I don't know much about the original song or the author, but I do have a couple of covers of it from different places in Latin America and saw there's a lot more on youtube. Don't bother, they all suck (there's a version by Irakere in that Cuban Funk Experience compilation that's pretty dope though), and so does this version here, by Los Líderes, who renamed the song "Taka Taka." On the flip-side you have "La Lira," and as far as I know, with my basic Spanish knowledge (after, you know, going to school and college and living most of my life down there) lira is Spanish for Lyre, that instrument that they played in Ancient Greece and  you see in Irish coins and stuff. So when I hear a guy singing a cumbia about a lyre that he has in his soul and doesn't let him rest and that lyre was born on a river shore, I'm like dude what the fuck are you talking about? Seriously, can you be a little less cryptic? Sure, "Taka Taka" doesn't mean anything in Spanish either, but it's pretty obvious the song is about having fun at the beach in the summer.  I sometimes wonder if back then people did free association of random words to come up with the titles and themes of songs and then I remind myself I have a song called "Salchichón Primavera."

ORQUESTA EL MACABEO-La Culpa/Se Pone Difícil (Discos de Hoy, 2011)

As a general rule, I'll pretty much buy anything that's Latin and pressed on 7'' vinyl, because if you're one of the extremely few who still releases music in that format, chances are, you're pretty cool. I didn't know anything about this one here, but following the aforementioned logic I bought it and I just finished listening to it for the first time and let me tell you, I'm not disappointed.
It's salsa, so it's not really my thing. I think I made very clear in many occasions that I don't listen to, don't spin and definitely don't dance to salsa. Still, I made an exception to that rule with Bio Ritmo and I'm pretty sure that same exception can apply to this Puerto Rican band of young salseros.
Unlike the dominant cheesy salsa of the bar bands doing covers of trait standards, these guys make all originals and they have an indie, D.I.Y. mentality and punk rock aesthetics (they also list La Polla Records among their influences). So there's definitely more of an edge here than what you listen at the average salsa dance parties. Still, both songs on this 33RPM EP are pretty slow. "La Culpa" has a delightful retro-keyboard line, but the BPM count barely reaches 70. The flip-side, starts even slower than that and then shifts abruptly to 95BPM, but the slow intro is way too long. So none of these two are dance-floor packing tracks and I'd have a hard time blending them smoothly into my dance set, but I still think I'll be giving them a spin or two during warm-up.
Anyway, just the notion that new young guys in current Puerto Rico are doing cool stuff like this and releasing it on vinyl (I later learn they have a 12'' album too) makes me feel hopeful about the revival of the format and makes me wonder if there are others like them. I need to do some research.

You can buy it directly from them here.

DIGGING: More 45 rips for y'all

It's been a while since my last grab-bag of 45 rips, and I've been accumulating way too many new (actually old, but new for me at least) 7 inch singles to dump them all in just one post, so please be patient, I'll try to catch up with a series of posts of which this is the first. To all the new followers who have been demanding that I re-upload the old collections of 45s because the links expired (or because megaupload disappeared) I'm sorry, but that's not going to happen, you missed the train on those. But don't worry there're plenty more coming up, so stay tuned to The Hard Data.

LOS WAWANCO-Volume#20 (Odeón Pops, date unknown): I've already posted a similar picture sleeve EP of Los Wawancó on a previous post. Like many Argentine releases of  that period, it comes in small hole 7'' vinyl but at 33RPM and with two songs on each side, unlike the usual cumbia 45RPM singles. Includes one of their greatest hits "Tiburón a la vista" one of the few cumbia songs I remember from my early childhood in the '70s. I don't know who did the original version of this (most likely somebody in Colombia) but during that decade this silly song about sharks eating people at the beach was tremendously popular in both Argentina and Mexico. In fact, Mexico's Titán made a great use of some version of it, turning it into a hip-hop beat for La Mala Rodríguez to rap on, on an early 2000's hit included on the soundtrack of the crossover movie Y Tu Mamá También.

PLUMA & SUS OCHO OCTAVOS-"El Cachumbembe" (Sonolux, date unknown): This is not a cumbia but I'm gonna go ahead and include it in this batch anyway because it's a pretty dope track. I know nothing at all about the artist or even the music style (it comes labeled as bomba, but considering this is pressed in Colombia, I don't assume this is the same thing they call bomba in Puerto Rico, you know how genres names have complete different meanings in each country). Still, it's very up-beat and afrocentric and it has an irresistible dancefloor-packing groove that never failed when I dropped it in my sets.

MANTECA-"Amalia Batista" (Discos Istmeños, date unknown): Another non-cumbia track worth sharing. A percussion-heavy Afro-Cuban classic in a Panamanian pressing. The song is a very well known standard thanks to the version made famous by Tipica 73, but I'd argue this version here by Manteca is way better and a lot funkier. I don't know any history behind or around this song and the black woman named Amanda Batista who's referred on those lyrics, who apparently had some super-powers over men. But just by googling her name you get such a wide array of result, from an opera all the way to a cheesy '80s telenovela. There must be some Cuban reader out there who'll come to the rescue and tell us who this mysterious woman was, I have no idea.

CESAR POMPEYO Y SU SONORA-"Cumbele" (Tropical, 1976): There's certainly a grey area where the line that separates cumbia from salsa gets blurred--at least for the people in the record labels in charge of labeling specific musical genres. The following two singles are examples of this, albeit from opposite directions. This song here is titled "Cumbele" and with a title like this you know it's gonna fall somewhere in the cumbia-related realm. It does. Somehow, however they labeled it African Salsa, and honestly the African elements are way easier to find than the salsa. The flip-side comes with a song that would more easily fall in the salsa category and it was properly labeled, although I didn't bother ripping it for this post because it didn't help me support any point.

THE LATIN BROTHERS-"Bella Cumbia" (Discos Fuentes, 1977): Following with the blurring of the lines that separate cumbia from salsa, here we find this golden age Discos Fuentes release with a song labeled as cumbia, and titled "Bella Cumbia" but with arrangements more appropriately typical of a salsa. So yeah, there you have it, first a song that I'd call cumbia, labeled salsa, and a song that I'd call salsa, labeled and titled cumbia. I mean, if these record label people in South America can't tell one from the other, how can we honestly expect the average gringo to differentiate genres?

LOS BESTIALES-"Soy Parrandero"/"Cumbia Moruna" (Peerless, 1977): In a previous batch of 45 rips I included the one that I assume is the original version of "Soy Parrandero" in an interpretation by Emir Boscan. This one here came out the same year and with a tighter more up-beat instrumentation and the same misogynist lyrics about a guy who wants to party all night just to come back home and find his wife waiting patiently for him with the dinner ready and the motherfucker tells her "hey, that's how I was when you first met me!" (Hadn't we all used that excuse at some point in our lives?) The flip side is a slower, sadder, but still danceable cumbia with a really nice piano and plenty of brass arrangements. I don't know anything about the artists but I assume they're Mexican (that's where the record is pressed) and I also will assume that the parrandero song was some sort of a big hit in Mexico in those years, since it matches perfectly the idiosyncrasy of the stereotypical old school Mexi-macho man. 

LOS SHAPIS-"Llantos de Amor" (Horóscopo Discos, date unknown): There's a lot of really sappy Peruvian cumbias, about crying and love lost and corny stuff like that. This is only on of them. I'm not a big fan of the genre. I like the whole psychedelic aspect of chicha, the surf guitar and the percussion, but I enjoy it the most on its instrumental format, when they come with lyrics, they're usually sad, unoriginal and in most cases very poorly written. Still, this track is pretty (unintentionally) funny, even if only for the introduction, when the singer/announcer (by the name of Chapulín!) comes out saying "don't cry no more my love" and right after that he starts dropping dude's names "Jorge Marti, Jaime Moreira" which probably back then led to a lot of confusion regarding the sexual orientation of said men. Sorry, I have the sense of humor of a  12-year-old boy. The flip-side was scratched so I couldn't rip it but it was also a sad song about losing a loved one.

LA LUZ ROJA DE SAN MARCOS CON ANICETO MOLINA-"Me voy para Macondo"/ "La Gorra" (Polydor, 1977): Accordion virtuoso Aniceto Molina is better known in Mexico, El Salvador and the US than his homeland Colombia. This particular single was recorded and pressed in Mexico and he even drops shout-outs to Mexican cities on it, but both songs are 100% Colombian. "Me voy para Macondo" was covered quite a few times (I also have a version by Argentina's Riki Maravilla) and as you may infer by the title is about going to that mythological town of Gabriel García Marquez's literature. The flip-side is a song by Lisandro Mesa about a hat. Yeah, just that. One appeals to the well-read intellectuals, the other one, at people who wear hats. Both are very high up there in the BPMs (140 to 150) making them really hard to mix in smoothly in a DJ set, but you can totally drop any of these two at the end of the night and I guarantee people will go bonkers. 

CHICHA LIBRE-Canibalismo (Barbés, 2012)

An instant favorite right here. Straight to the list of candidates for best of 2012.
Chicha Libre may have started as a Brooklyn-based tribute band to an obscure music genre nobody in the Northern Hemisphere had heard of before, but they have grown and developed their own thing by both, going deeper into chicha roots and expanding into other genres. Canibalismo is proof of that.
Chicha Libre is not stuck looking backwards, trying to recreate a bygone era, but using those old Peruvian records as a framework to create something new and current, pretty much in the same manner that Bio Ritmo evokes 70's salsa.
On their second album, the band commanded by frenchman Olivier Conan, wisely avoids the covers of classic Peruvian tunes, that in the time that has passed since their debut, have become common place. Still, the atmosphere of the ayahuasca-infused Amazon jungle trip is present over all the album.
There's a stronger, tighter percussion on this new album (those timbales!) that make the mix sound a lot funkier and I know DJs and break-beat diggers will be thankful. There's also some quirky numbers like the chicha cover of Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries" that could've only been conceived while flying over Iquitos on a helicopter with the side doors opened. There's even a subtle wink to cumbia villera's characteristic keyboard on "Lupita en la selva y el doctor" a song with pretty funny lyrics as you may infer from the title. But most of the songs are instrumental-only or instrumental-with-announcer-talking-in-the-breaks and that's when I like them the best, like on the album opener, "La Plata," that's begging to be pressed on a 7'' single and become a must on all my DJ sets.
Canibalismo will be out in May on digital and CD, there're no announcements of vinyl release anywhere yet, but I'm leaning to assume they're gonna press some singles at least (like they did with their debut) although a double LP (like they did with Roots of Chicha) would be welcomed too.