THE HARD DATA

Kase.O Jazz Magnetism (BOA, 2011)

2012-01-13T09:15:00.000-08:00

In many ways Kase.O epitomizes the Spanish paradox I referred to in that article I posted back at the dawn of Ana Tijoux's successful international crossover. Spain's Kase.O is widely regarded by Spanish rap connoisseurs as the best MC to ever bless the mic in this language, worldwide. I wouldn't go as far as confirming that legendary status, but I agree that if he's not strictly the best ever, he definitely is among the top three. Still, he remains absolutely unknown by the non-Spanish speaking world.
There are multiple reasons behind that curious phenomenon. For instance, Kase.O is a lyricist's favorite lyricist. And those are not particularly the kind of rappers that tend to get mainstream exposure (Pharoahe Monch, case in point). He has zero mainstream appeal: he's not particularly handsome, he's not really charismatic, he doesn't rhyme about trivial party bullshit over booty-shaking beats and his monotone flow can bore the pants off you if you don't have a deep understanding of the Spanish language. Also, he's not a girl (for some reason the only Spanish-speaking MC's that managed to get the attention of the Anglophone media are almost exclusively all girls: Ana Tijoux, La Mala Rodríguez, Niña Dioz...).
Still, when it comes to competing on the mic, rhyme by rhyme, verse by verse, nobody can touch Violadores del Verso's Kase.O. His laid back style is deceptive, makes it sound so easy that probably pushed thousands of neophytes to pick up the mic and give it a try. But that's exactly where the grandiosity of his rap resides, he makes very complex verbal acrobatics seem so basic that anybody could potentially emulate them. Very few can.
Jazz Magnetism is Kase.O's equivalent to Guru's Jazzmatazz. Not trying to draw parallelisms here, but the concept is quite similar to the one by Mustafayoda & Los Métricos reviewed in the previous post. For this solo adventure, Kase.O temporary broke away from the restrains of his group to work on this ambitious project where he flows seamlessly over a live jazz band. The selection include some of his Violadores del Verso classics in jazzified versions plus many dope new tracks. Hopefully the cool jazzy background will make it a lot more digestible for the non-Spanish speaking audience and he'll get at least some of the global attention he's probably aiming for (with the album art) and he truly deserves. But if this still doesn't work, it's still OK, he doesn't really need it. He's very comfortable being the undisputed emperor of his niche.

Album available digitally on iTunes, eMusic and other retailers. Worth every penny.

MUSTAFAYODA Y LOS METRICOS-La Poderosa (Sudamétrica, 2011)

2012-01-06T08:16:00.000-08:00

I just came back from Argentina, where I bought a lot of records (mostly old cumbia LPs) and only one CD, this one by my old friend Mustafayoda.
I've mentioned him many times already on this blog, not because he is a friend, but because he's like the best representative of Argentine homegrown hip-hop, with a style that's totally his own which created a whole school of acolytes who follow him as an authentic caudillo of the Buenos Aires western outskirts.
This time around, the southern freestyle rap pioneer, has a new project in hands. He re-recorded many of his classic songs in totally new versions with a live band (Los Metricos) and the result is surprisingly good. I honestly didn't expected much, I though his hard-core anti-melodic vocal style wouldn't translate appropriately to the live band experience, but somehow it does. The lyrics are pretty much the same, but the music is completely different from the original versions and so is his flow, which turns the composition into refreshingly new material, instead of refried self-covers of old tracks. Wisely, he changed the titles of the songs to, thus, "El Niño" becomes "Bebes nacen," "Rondas Nocturnas" becomes simply "Rondas," and "Golpe de palmas" becomes "Para todos los perdidos." The impeccable production was almost entirely done by Gas-Lab (who also has a recently-released instrumental acid jazz album worth checking out) who leads the seven-member live band and lays down a few samples on the MPC. A project of epic proportions for the artist and for the independent, Argentine hip-hop scene as a whole.

Stream/Purchase it here.

TOP-11 LIVE SHOWS OF 2011

2011-12-15T09:03:00.000-08:00

Not a good year for concert for me. I didn't get to see as many memorable shows as usual and unlike the previous two years, I only did a couple of DJ sets opening for live bands. Still I got to see my beloved Ana Tijoux three times in a year and that was dope. Don't have much more to add, sorry, not a very inspired post but what the hell...

1.- Calle 13 @ The Fillmore: Last time I saw Calle 13 live was also the first time I've ever heard any song by them. That was in 2006, right after their first album came out. Since then, they've become the most relevant Latin American artist of the decade, so I was really excited to see them live again and I finally got the chance to do so when, after a few cancelled shows, they finally came to San Francisco in 2011. My only criticism, they had no opening act and they took way too long to get on stage, and in the meantime we had to listen to this moron of a DJ playing the most horrible old-school dumb merengue-hip-hop, the absolute opposite of what Calle 13 aesthetically represents.

2.- Jorge Drexler @ Mezzanine: Another genuine master in the art of rhyming words much like Calle 13's Residente, but instead of doing it in the form of rap verses, he sings and does it very well, and does it over some very interesting music that defy easy labeling. I was honestly surprised at the crazy amount of people that showed up and packed the venue on a weeknight, especially considering this Uruguayan singer is not particularly popular on a mainstream level here in the US, but I guess good music moves through other channels and it doesn't really matter if radios don't play him and hip blogs don't cover him.

3.- Nacional Records Tour @ Regency: Ana Tijoux opened, followed by Los Amigos Invisibles and then Nortec Collective closed, and in between shows, I got to DJ a Nacional Records-centric set to a crowd that barely acknowledged me. I sometimes give Nacional Records a hard time here at my blog, but at the end of the day I have nothing but love for these guys, not only they release some of my favorite artists in the US, they also send me tons of cool free music and they also hire me to play at their event, how cool is that?

4.- Ana Tijoux @ Outside Lands: I didn't like this year's line-up for Outside Lands, our Bay Area massive summer music festival. But they had Ana Tijoux playing and I wouldn't miss that for anything. I saw a couple other decent performances, but all my expectations were in her show, the first time I got to see her in the US with full band. The following day she also did a surprise guest appearance at Julieta Venegas's show and that would've be the highlight of the whole festival if it wasn't for the idiot of the sound guy who left the soundboard unattended just when Ana went on stage... and her microphone was off.

5.- Chico Trujillo @ The Elbo Room: It's always a lot of fun to see these guys live and it's also a great honor to open for them for a second year in a row. Chico Trujillo is cumbia's ultimate party band and considering cumbia's current popularity, they'd deserve to be way bigger in a global scale, but for some reason I still get the sense that their concerts here are mostly a reunion of Chileans living abroad.

6.- Ana Tijoux @ The Elbo Room: Yes, 2011 was an overdose of Ana Tijoux, I've got to see her on stage three times in a year and I can't complaint about it. I've spent much of the previous nine years talking to Ana via chat, both of us fantasizing about her coming to play in the US and seeing ways to make it possible. For her Elbo Room show she brought MC Hordatoj and DJ Dacel with her from Chile and I ran into Dacel before the show and didn't recognize him and he was like "dude, remember that time we went to Argentina with Ana and we all got drunk at your house and passed out in your couch" awww good times...

7.- Reggae Latino @ Mezzanine: Not enough Chileans on this list? Well here you have Chilean reggae band Gondwana, who played at this Latin Reggae festival with Argentina's Los Cafres and Puerto Rico's Cultura Profética. Great night, amazing shows, packed venue with lots of hot girls. Man, I did't know reggae en español was that popular! I really hope this festival becomes a recurring thing, every year, and they bring artists like Morodo, Fidel Nadal, Alika, etc because honestly I'm not into the whole romantic mellow reggae ballads at all.

8.- Sergent García w/ Rupa & The April Fishes @ New Parish: Sometimes show's lineups don't make any sense, specially when you're talking about Latin music shows. You have all probably seen something like this happen: they put a salsa band as opening act for a rock band, just because they both speak Spanish. That's how dumb show promoters are sometimes when reducing Latin audiences to a cliché. In this case however, Sergent García with Rupa made absolute sense. Both of them are born in France (one from Spanish parents, the other one Indian) and both share this mestizo approach to global politically-concious multilingual party music which roots can be traced back to The Clash (in fact Rupa made a cover of The Clash). The venue was small and it was only half full, but what a great time we had!

9.- Quantic @ Som: What a cool dude Quantic end up being! I laughed my ass off talking to him backstage before the show and then the show was pretty cool too. He did two parts, one where he basically played his own tracks from beginning to end without mixing but adding some live instrumentation on top of some and then a second part that was basically a DJ set, but all digital. Knowing he's a vinyl collector I was expecting him to play some obscure 45s he found in Colombia, but nope. Still a very decent DJ set.

10.- M.I.S. @ Outside Lands: I love M.I.S. and his live performances have all been memorable (I'll never forget that one in 2009 when I got to open for him/them) but as a DJ set I was a bit disappointed. First the sound quality was horrible and then he wouldn't even try to blend songs into each other, he was just dropping tracks off burned CDs one after the other, going from 86 BPM to 130 BPM with no transition at all. On top of that, they put him to play at this small tent with capacity for only 200 people and there was an hour long line outside to get in, plus the tent had no bathrooms, so if you had to go, you had to leave the tent and then get back in line and miss three quarters of the show. That's exactly what happened to me.

11.- Pete Escobedo @ Life is Living: This guy is a living legend and his band was hella tight. How come they put him as an opening act before Los Rakas?

TOP-11 LATIN BUT COOL VIDEOS OF 2011

2011-12-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

1.- CALLE 13 "Latinoamérica": For second consecutive year, Calle 13 takes the best video of the year award at The Hard Data and that should not be a surprise to anybody. Simply put, Calle 13 is the most significant thing that happened to Latin music in the past decade. If this song doesn't give you goosebumps, you have no heart... or you don't understand Spanish.

2.- ANA TIJOUX "Elefant": Not an official video. At least it wasn't conceived as such. This dude in LA did a photo session with Ana the day of her show at the Grammy awards ceremony and then he voluntarily edited those photos with a little bit of video to the beat of DJ Dacel's mixtape and voilá, you have a mind-blowing video, for free!

3.- EL DUSTY "K Le Pasa": I always hated Texas for all the obvious reasons and I always said that'd be like the last state I'd move to (well, actually second to last, right behind Florida). But after watching DJ Dus, a.k.a. El Dusty throwing a party of this caliber to such an infectious tune, I decided it must not be so bad after all, right? Maybe I'll go visit sometime.

4.- MATI ZUNDEL "Señor Montecostes": This video is all wow from beginning to end. Maybe even a bit too much, I feel kinda guilty when I watch it, you know, like too much of a good thing can end up being bad or something. In a year when ZZK Records didn't release as many albums as we'd want them to, this astonishing video by Larartijeando's Mati Zundel made me forgive them and expect anxiously for 2012.

5.- DESNATURALEZ "No Te Pasi La Película": Here's one that you won't see at anybody else's best of the year lists. I outgrew hardcore hip-hop a long time ago, but this video is so good and the guys are such skilled MCs that it totally brings me back to my b-boy days when we used to go nuts for every new joint by VKR, CPV or Violadores Del Verso.

6.- PONCHO "Please Me": I don't usually miss the city where I grew up, but when I watched this video it really made me go back to Buenos Aires. The Tourism Secretary of Buenos Aires should be using this video to promote the city. In just four and a half minutes it compiles all the reasons why it's the most amazing city in Latin America and why all the rest of the cities in the continent are hopelessly jealous because they'll never attain such a level of coolness.

7.- BOMBA ESTERO "Ponte Bomb": People here in the US fail to realize the global impact that European hip-house had in the 89/92 period, specially over those kids who, like myself, were teenagers then. Here they see Techntronic as just an embarrassing one-hit-wonder, but down in Latin America they were huge and this Belgian song was some sort of a dancefloor anthem for a whole generation, even when we didn't understand the lyrics. Plus, you get to see Li Saumet's booty... on the floor, tonight.

8.- BABASONICOS "Muñeco De Haiti": I'll always love Babasónicos and killer bees are hella cool, so yeah, this video also makes it into my Top-11. These guys always come up with the craziest, most original, concepts for their videos. Sometimes they work better than others, some are just too weird, but this one here is a lot of fun.

9.- CRIOLO "Fregues da Meia-Noite": Criolo is the best thing that came out from Brazil in a long time but I already made that statement and coerced you to download his album on a previous post so, I'll only say one word: sideboob.

10.- M.E.D. "Blaxican": Solid rhymes, Beats by Madlib, direction by Mochilla's Eric Coleman, what else do you need, shit is dope.

11.- CULTURA PROFETICA "Ilegal": As a general rule, mellow, romantic reggae bores the pants off me. I wouldn't give a video of this type of music a chance to convince me otherwise, unless, of course, it's packed with hot half-naked models. Plus, the video answers the long-standing question: can a dorky guy with a creepy-ass lonely dreadlock long enough to wipe his butt score with two hot girls at once? Only in his dreams.

CAMPO-Bajofondo Presenta Campo (Bajofondo, 2011)

2011-12-11T09:18:00.001-08:00

It's really frustrating when stuff like this happens. This album totally deserved to be on my Top-11 Latin But Cool Albums of 2011, in fact it could've easily been in the Top 3. But I didn't know it was already released until I this morning when I woke up thinking about "what ever happened to that Bajofondo side-project that seemed so promising?" and decided to go check online and yeah, it's already out, and it's been out for almost a month.
I'm a big fan of Bajofondo and when I saw that they had this new project, guided by Bajofondo's member Juan Campodónico, where they'd explore other South American sounds outside of the tango spectrum (meaning cumbia!!!) it blew my mind.
Ñu-cumbia produced with the world-renown impossibly high standards of Bajofondo, I mean, dude, it doesn't get much better than this, right? To be fair, only two of the ten album tracks fall into the ñu-cumbia category (and they both have lyrics in English!) but the rest is equally beautiful.
Now, the thing is, I can't wrap my head around how the fuck this ever happened? How come an album of this importance got away from me? Not that I'm claiming that I'm so important that they should've sent it to me personally before it came out, but hey, not only I'm a journalist who explicitly covers this type of music for more media than just this tiny blog, I've even already covered Campo on Remezcla. And more, I'm a fan of Campo and Bajofondo, and I follow them and I'm friend with their members personally on Facebook and I like spend most of my waking life online, I don't remember seeing anybody post anything, anywhere about this. And I'm friends with a lot of people who love Bajofondo, in fact whenever I go to a Bajofondo concert is like going to a friends reunion where every time I turn in any random direction I run into somebody else I know. What I'm trying to say is, if I didn't hear about this being released, I'm pretty sure 99% of my Bajofondo-loving friends out there don't even know it exists. So how is it even possible for this to happen? We're not talking about some obscure underground shit from back in the rancho here, we're talking about freaking Oscar-winning über-producer Gustavo Santaolalla.
Are they purposely playing the low profile card on this and expecting word-of-mouth to do all the promotional work? Or do they have the world's worst publicist ever? Dudes, call me, I can surely recommend you a good publicist.

TOP-11 LATIN BUT COOL DANCE SONGS OF 2011

2011-12-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

Right here you have the 11 new songs that I played the most on my DJ sets during 2011. Only songs released during 2011 qualify for this list, though. Yeah I know that sucks for songs that were released by the end of last year and I didn't incorporate them into my set until 2011 and it also sucks for songs that were released too close to the making of this list because I didn't have time to play them much. Lesson for labels who care about this bullshit, release your shit earlier in the year. Whatever, it doesn't really matter. This is basically what you've been listening in my parties during 2011 and you'll notice most of it is released on vinyl, because that's the format I've been playing the most this year. Also, there's no particular mathematical formula for sorting the songs, basically from 1 to 10 they are sorted in the way they came up to my mind and 11, as usual, is the bonus track, the oddball that I add for my own amusement and yours too.

1.- DJ RAFF "Cocaina"(Nacional Records): I was actually playing this one already since 2010 because Raff sent me an early bootleg version of it way before the album came out in 2011. It's a very slow tempo song so it's hard to mix it in my regular set that's goes from 95 to 130bpm, but it's so damn good that I had to make an exception and just drop it, many, many times.

2.- EL DUSTY "K Le Pasa" (Man Recordings): Perfect timing! Dus sent me this one right when I was getting my set ready to go DJ as an opening act for Chilean cumbia/punk outfit Chico Trujillo. The song samples the classic Colombian cumbia "El Conductor" by Mike Laure that particularly in Chile is one of the most famous cumbias ever thanks to the cover done by who else but Chico Trujillo? So when I played this right before they went on stage, the whole club went bananas! Five months later the video came out and it became a hit among bloggers and it caught the attention of the German label Man Recordings who re-released it with new mixing and great sound.

3.- QUANTIC "Un Canto A Mi Tierra (J Boogie Remix)" (Tru Thoughts): This one took a while to grow on me. I never really dug the original version and then these remixes came out and I was like, yeah, cool, but I still didn't play it because I still thought that the girl's voice sounded too extravagant and that would weird people out and distract them from dancing. But then I heard many other DJ's started playing it and I decided to give it a chance, so yeah, I changed my mind. Big time.

4.- CAPTAIN PLANET "Dame Agua" (Bastard Jazz): An instant hit that became mandatory on my sets since the first time I dropped the needle on the record. I just wish more Latin funky stuff like this was available out there so I wouldn't have to scramble so hard to put together a decent set of cool Latin music. Thanks to Bastard Jazz for sending me a complimentary vinyl!

5.- DJ RAFA CAIVANO "The Salmon Cumbia" (independent): I never really got into the whole moombahton craze that flooded the blogosphere in 2011 with clones and disposable MP3s, mainly because I consider it a passing fad, also because it soon lost any connection to Latin music whatsoever becoming its own thing, and last but no least, because there's no vinyl available. This is one "cumbahton" track, however, I played a lot this past year. Released for free by one half of the ZZK duo Frikstailers, it's one of the only two or three incursions in that bizarre hybrid genre that I allowed myself to indulge in.

6.- DJ NEGRO "Demencia" (Bersa Discos): Argentina's DJ Negro always finds a way to sneak into my best of the year lists. This one was included in 2011's only vinyl release by local label Bersa Discos and it's really dope if you play it at 45rpm instead of 33 like the rest of the record. Unfortunately couldn't find any stream available online.

7.- JD TWITCH "Cumbia 4"(Let's Get Lost): A British DJ with no previous connection to Latin music, jumps in the bandwagon of the ñu-cumbia movement, late, travels to Colombia and comes back with a bunch of classics that he re-edits making them DJ-friendly but without giving proper credit to any of the original artists in a total bootleg white-label format. Wanna hate on this post-colonial exploitation by the Europeans of South American music, be my guest. Me, I love every second of it and I play the shit out of this vinyl. "Cumbia 4" is actually an extended mix of Wganda Kenya's "Tifit Hayed" a track that I was playing a lot already in its original incarnation, but I'll never have to do that again, since this version kicks so much ass and makes the club go crazy like nothing else.

8.- EMPRESARIOS "Cumbia (Nickodemus Remix)" (Fort Knox Records): This one was available digitally before 2011 on a Fort Knox compilation and I even included it on one of my mixtapes, but it didn't become a staple on my DJ sets until 2011 because that's when the vinyl came out, so for what it matters, on The Hard Data, you don't become really official until you press it on wax. Anyway, I've been playing a lot of Empresarios stuff this year, some of their new stuff too, but this one is still my favorite from them.

9.- CEAESE "2011"(independent): New school Chilean hip-hop of the best kind. I DJ'd a few hip-hop in Spanish events this year and every time I included this track and it stole the show. It's also available for free and that's great, so if you still don't have it, this is your chance to catch up.

10.- TOY SELECTAH "Half Colombian Half Mexican Bandit" (Mad Decent): Similar to the Empresarios track, this one was available digitally for almost two years before the vinyl came out (very late) on Mad Decent records. So it wasn't until 2011 that I really started playing it in all my sets. Still, it hasn't gotten old.

11.- JUAN MAGAN "Bailando Por Ahí"(Sony Music): Because I still do mainstream Latin music parties and because I simply love the fact that this guy is from Spain and he broke into the game just a couple of years ago and all of a sudden took over and became the alpha-dog in the commercial dance music field previously dominated exclusively by Puerto Rican and Miami douchebags. I rather play ten back-to-back tracks by this guy than just one by Pitbull.

TOP-11 LATIN BUT COOL ALBUMS OF 2011

2011-12-07T11:13:00.001-08:00

I rarely if ever listen to full albums so compiling this list is always quite hard for me. As you know I'm a fan of the single format and as a DJ I rarely play more than one or two tracks from a record. The experience of listening to a whole album from beginning to end is almost completely foreign to me, or it would be if it wasn't for the fact that I'm married and my wife still listens to CDs, at home and in the car, so she influenced this top-11 list a lot.

1.- DANAY SUAREZ-Polvo De La Humedad (independent): You probably won't see this album in too many other Best of 2011 lists and that's a pity, really. This is by far the album I listened to the most this year and that's because it's so fucking beautiful I can't get enough of it. Also because my wife fell under its spell too and plays it almost every day at home. If you follow me you know I have a thing for female rappers, but trust me, this goes beyond any fetish of mine, she's seriously that good.

2.- CRIOLO-Nó Na Orelha (independent): There's nothing that isn't perfect about this album. Absolute audible pleasure from beginning to end. I didn't know about Criolo until 2011 so it could also be listed as this year's greatest discovery. Criolo's debut album has everything I love, cool conscious hip-hop, afro-beat, samba, dub, jazz, classic arrangements, dope lyrics, great vocals, and it's even released on vinyl (only in Brazil though, but just knowing it's out there makes me happy). I could listen to this album on a constant loop without even being tempted to skip a track and I'd never get bored. If you still haven't checked this one out, go and download it from his own website, it's free!

3.- DJ RAFF-Latino & Proud (Nacional Records): Chile's DJ Raff has been my favorite Latin American DJ since the '90s so I was kinda frustrated that it took so long for the rest of the world to discover him. In 2011 Nacional Records finally released a DJ Raff record that compiles tracks from his last two or three releases and if you disregard the lame change of title (misguided marketing move, I say), the album is nothing short of amazing.

4.- BIO RITMO-La verdad (Electric Cowbell): For the first and maybe only time in history a salsa album makes it to the top-11 at The Hard Data awards. Granted is not really salsa in the sense most Latinos refer to salsa nowadays, but it's the type of salsa that if it was more the norm, it wouldn't annoy me at all to play it in my sets. I've been using this vinyl to warm up the dancefloor at pretty much all my sets this year and my wife's been playing the CD in the living room quite a bit too. So yeah, congrats to Bio-Ritmo for being the exception to the rule.

5.- ERIC BOBO & LATIN BITMAN-Welcome To The Ritmo Machine (Nacional Records): A great idea. Of course, like in all albums conceived around collaborations, there are highs and lows, tracks that will please a crowd and disappoint others, simply because there's too much variety. But overall, it's some top notch production with some kick as percussion and if Nacional would dignify this release with a proper vinyl pressing, I'd be playing it a lot more, I'm sure about that.

6.- JOAQUIN CLAUSSELL-Hammock House Africa Caribe (Fania): Another great idea for a DJ album: give the entire catalog of golden age Fania records to a house DJ and make a conceptual mixtape but make sure that it avoids completely the cheesy salsa fusion clichés to focus on the shamanistic Afro-Caribbean atmospheres and hypnotic tribal rhythms. The CD box set is a collectible piece of art in itself, and somewhere out there vinyl discs of the individual remixed tracks is available too, but I didn't know that, I just found out when I googled it right now. Damn, I need to get that!

7.- CHANCHA VIA CIRCUITO-Río Arriba (ZZK Records): The digital album came out in 2010 and many blogs included it in their best of the year lists last year. I didn't. For two reasons: I didn't get to listen to this album until early 2011 and it wasn't until 2011 that the album was released on vinyl and that's the format that rules around here. Anyway, the album's dope but it's too laid back and down-tempo for the dancefloor so it never makes it into my dance sets, but a few weeks ago I DJ'd at an art gallery opening and it totally made sense to play this shit, finally.

8.- SERGENT GARCIA-Una y Otra Vez (Cumbancha): I honestly didn't pay much attention to this one when it came out beyond the Li Saumet guest appearance. But then I interviewed the guy and he was mad cool and saw him live and had a great time and then my wife started playing the CD a lot at home and it ended up winning me.

9.- DJ AFRO-Free (Nacional Records): Oops, I almost forgot this one came out! I love DJ Afro and I always play his previous solo album which was in fact a collection of housey remixes he did for other people. This one I got it, I listened to it, I liked it and then it somehow got lost amongst the infinite piles of digital rubbish of my hard-drive and I totally forgot to ever play it again. That wouldn't have happened if it was released on vinyl, you see Nacional?

10.- TOMMY GUERRERO-Lifeboats and Follies (Galaxia Records): Once again it's my wife's fault that this album made it into the top-11. I would've totally forgotten about it, if it wasn't for her who kept it in rotation in the living room's CD player, which she basically controls (I mostly just listen to music on vinyl and my Ipod, don't have much love for CDs). It's jazzy, cool, laid back music that sound's great when you're having brunch on the weekends with home-made bloody marys.

11.- ANA TIJOUX-La Bala (Oveja Negra/Nacional Records): OK, this one shouldn't be here. It should either be a lot closer to the top or in 2012's Best Album list. But as I mentioned on the review yesterday, I was having a really hard time trying to find 11 albums for this year's list and I needed to fill it in with something. So there it goes, as a sort of bonus at the end of the list and who knows, may be next year we'll have it listed again since it won't come out, officially in the US, until January 2012.

ANA TIJOUX-La Bala (Oveja Negra 2011/Nacional 2012)

2011-12-07T08:18:00.001-08:00

Ana Tijoux's third official album as a solo artist is scheduled for release at late January in the US by Nacional Records. But here at The Hard Data, we are not willing to wait that long. And by we I mean I.
The album has been available for over a month in her homeland, Chile, and the first single "Shock" has been catching plenty of buzz online thanks to its video--even though the label tried hard to delay its global release by blocking it from viewers of certain countries (us). Am I supposed to sit around and wait patiently for a whole other month to listen to the new album by one of my all-time favorite artist (and good friend)? Hell no. Not in the global age when people have instant access to new stuff the moment it's released even if it's on the other side of the planet. We are not in the '80s anymore when we had no other choice but to wait six month for a European new album to reach the record stores down in our under-developed nations.
Still, I do understand Nacional's decision to kick back the release of the album a couple of months because they most probably didn't want it to compete for attention with the magnificent Ritmo Machine (two chilean hip-hop albums on the market at the same time can be too much to handle). But anyway, I already reviewed Ana's groundbreaking 1977 almost a year before it was released in the US (I'm pretty sure I was the very first one to post a review of that album on the world wide web) and I reviewed Ana's (back then still Anita) solo debut on the very first post of this blog even though it was never released in the US. And I also reviewed Ana's-former-band Makiza's releases in previous blogs and US-based magazines even though pretty much nobody else in this whole USA knew who she was back then.
So if one thing is clear, it is that The Hard Data doesn't follow the capricious territoriality and calendars of record labels. And The Hard Data has eternal love for Mademoiselle Tijoux, so do never expect an objective review of her music from here.
Anyway, La Bala (the bullet), that's the title of Ana's new album and no, she hasn't gone gangsta (don't let that collaboration with Sick Jacken deceive you). La Bala pretty much follows the same aesthetics successfully established by its predecesor with the same jazzy smoothness but with more live instrumental arrangements and less boom-bap and scratch. After experimenting for a while with different formats during most of the last decade, trying to find her voice, Ana wisely decided on 1977 to go back to her essence, to what she knew best, to what had set her apart in her beginnings with Makiza: smooth, introspective, feminine, conscious rap with a tiny bit of singing here and there. The result was surprisingly successful, and the world fell in love with Chile's best kept secret, and Ana pretty much erased from her curriculum and repertoire all that middle-age of her career where she flirted with rock, dance and pop. La Bala shows us exactly that, the same Ana from 1977 who's very proud and comfortable with her b-girl stance and doesn't need to experiment any more with other styles and markets because she had finally found her niche and her voice.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that La Bala is 1977 all over again, by any means. It is indeed a deeper, more mature exploration on that same direction and it sounds a lot better, with more refined production and top-notch mixing and mastering. So if you discovered and fell in love with her with 1977 you're gonna love La Bala from beginning to end.
One thing that struck me as odd is that after the success of 1977 and the partial crossover of Ana to the Anglo hip-hop world, with all the contacts she made touring all over the US during the last couple of years, she decided to leave the whole production of the album to Chileans and limit the guest appearances to a handful of Latin American artists (Jorge Drexler from Uruguay, Los Aldeanos from Cuba, Curumin from Brazil) when she could've easily landed some major collaboration with renown US rappers and producers who would certainly grant her more exposure among the hip-hop heads who don't usually pay attention to foreign stuff. That was a conscious decision she made, and one to be respected. Maybe it's not the right time for a full crossover yet and she's saving those cards for a later game, maybe she'll never do it. I asked her about this backstage at Outside Lands and she said something like "there's so much superb talent in Chile to showcase, no need to go anywhere else."
Anyway, they say Nacional Records will release it on January 31st, at least that's what I read somewhere online (I really hope they don't delay it even more). I still have to decide if this counts as an entry for the Best of 2011 record list on the annual Hard Data Awards but I'm leaning towards a yes because I don't think there have been enough good albums this year to fill my Top-11.

Juan Lennon Presents: 213 Cumbia Vol. 1 (Triumphant Records, 2011)

2011-11-11T07:33:00.001-08:00

When I think of Los Angeles a nightmare of traffic jams and extensive parking lots is the first thing that comes to mind. For others, however, Los Angeles means many different things and for some it means cumbia.

The Southern California megalopolis is home to a large underground scene of cumbia artists and DJs; diverse people from diverse backgrounds that approach cumbia from all sorts of angles. In 213 Cumbia Volume 1, compiler Juan Lennon tries to encompass all these variety of cumbia-related expressions in a collection that aims to define the LA sound of cumbia, if there's such a thing.

Some of the artists included are very well known by the global fans of the ñu-cumbia movement, starting with my buddies DJ Lengua and Mexican Dubwiser on the edgier side of the comp. But there's also examples of people who fall more into the revisionist, rootsy approach like Buyepongo and Chicano Batman. And a lot of new names, new for me at least, with interesting proposals worth checking out (Black Guiro comes to mind).

I have no fucking idea who this Juan Lennon mythical figure is and how he managed to conjure all these cumbia lovers in a city where meeting with people is so hard because most of the times you're stuck on traffic. But he did a pretty good job, if you are willing to disregard the ghettoness/amateurism of the cover art. The comp is only released on CD, so far, no digital downloads but I've been told they'll be pressing a limited run in red vinyl. If this prophecy materializes this instantly will become one of my favorite records of the year, but note, some of the tracks on this comp are already available on vinyl on Unicornio Records (DJ Lengua and Chicano Batman, both reviewed on this blog before).

Listen/Purchase here.

CANDELARIA (Self Released, 2011)

2011-11-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

The SF-Bay Area scene has been ahead of the game since the beginnings of the ñu-cumbia movement and many artists and record labels (Bersa, Unicornio) from here had been fundamental in the establishment and development of this global scene.
But there's also been a whole local parallel underground scene that's been widely ignored in the blogosphere maybe because they tend to aim more towards the roots and traditional cumbia, rather than the cutting-edge experimental and/or DJ-oriented stuff.

Candelaria somehow dwells in between these two scenes and appeals almost equally to both crowds. I have big respect for them because I've seen these guys around in the scene a lot, at every remotely cumbia-related event and they seem to know what's up. Still, me being an active DJ in the scene and them a live band, our conflicting schedules didn't allow for a chance for me to ever see them live. So I had a lot of expectations for this release, but at the same time I didn't really know what I was gonna find.

The concept behind Candelaria was to create a some eclectic, rootsy, transnational approach to cumbia with a reggae-dub twist and I'm all for these kind of experiments. However with a premise like that, I was hoping for something more in the lines of Frente Cumbiero's last year release with Mad Professor. And if that's what you expected too, you'll be disappointed because the dubby side of the project is too watered down and leans heavily towards the old school rural Northern Colombian cumbia.

But that's no reason to dismiss this self-titled debut album at all. There're some really good tunes here, a couple of interesting covers of standards ("La Curura," "No, No, No") and remarkable original numbers (like the album opener, "Las Cruces," my personal favorite). The voice of the front woman (her last name is Candelaria) is impeccable and the band sounds tight.

I'd like them to lose a bit of that respect for the cumbia roots and be more playful with it, more experimental with the dub soundscapes and way more innovative with the lyrics. As you know I am a lot more attracted toward the kitsch and out-of-context irony of ñu-cumbia than the old rural songs that talk about fishermen, mountains and donkeys.
I like cumbia to be fun, even if I respect those roots and I like those old cumbias from a digger point of view, I can't personally relate to them because they have nothing to do with my very urban upbringing or my current situation. What I'm trying to say is, whenever I see one of those early Discos Fuentes 7'' records I dive head first to snatch it, but that doesn't mean that's the type of cumbia I wanna listen to--I wanna learn from that, I wanna sample break beats from that, I wanna laugh at its naivety, sure, but I don't know if I'd wanna go see those artists live if they performed in my town. That's just my point of view though, and I'm not trying to imply that's the right way to relate to cumbia at all, lots of people from all walks of life have been lately approaching cumbia from so many different angles and it's all interesting, it all adds up.

Candelaria have my full support and I'm looking forward to catch them live soon (I've been told the singer is quite pretty too, unfortunately the photos in the CD's booklet are too out of focus to appreciate that), maybe we'll get to share stage too, who knows. One last suggestion, let some DJ remix the opening track and the last one, "Pendejita," something dope could definitely come out from those.

Purchase it here.

OS MAGRELOS-Luz Negra +more (Electric Cowbell, 2011)

2011-11-08T08:40:00.000-08:00

I've recently received a pile of 7'' singles from my friends at Electric Cowbell, this awesome NY-based record label that prioritizes this specific format -my personal favorite- for releasing their music. A bunch of crazy stuff, some of them even defy description, but I love them all and I already incorporated three of them to my vinyl set rotation.
This is one of the seven records simultaneously released and it was the first obvious choice to enter my DJ set, simply because it's the only one that has any obvious Latin elements. Os Magrelos is, in fact, a side project by Bio Ritmo's keyboardist Marlysse Simmons where she steps away from the salsa to focus on Brazilian samba and bossa nova, but keeping that same kind of archeological approach for old-school sound.
As you all know I have some profound love for Brazilian music in almost all its forms but to be honest I've gotten sick of bossa nova (maybe after the overdose I experienced during the bossa nova revival of the early '00s) and being a DJ whose main goal is to make people dance instead of cuddle I obviously lean more towards the percussion-heavy side of Brazilian samba and funk. Still, this 45 by Os Magrelos didn't disappoint me at all. It has one original bossa nova track (with guest vocals by Laura Ann) that I skipped and two instrumental tracks that I instantly loved (even though they're on the downtempo end of the spectrum) because of their inner funkiness and the hypnotic retro-sound of the vintage keyboard. I played both those tracks at my warm-up set last week and they sound great, so I'll most probably be keeping this 7 inch beauty permanently in my record-case to go.
Now I gotta make a worthy exception and mention a couple more of these releases even though they do not particularly fall into the Latin But Cool category that strictly limits the contents of this blog. The first one is by The Sway Machinery in an odd collaboration between American musicians and a Malian singer resulting in the funkiest record of this memorable set. Particularly their track "Youba" that actually flows seamlessly into Os Magrelos' "Luz Negra" if you ever wanted to make an Electric Cowbell mixtape. The second one is a total oddity, a kind of novelty track that works wonders on the dancefloor. NO BS! Brass Band does an instrumental cover of the epitome one-hit-wonder of the whole '80s synth-pop era: A-Ha's "Take On Me." First I thought the idea was stupid and it'd be hella cheesy but after a second listen I realized that I HAD to drop this as a peak-of-the-night track to set the dancefloor on fire and when we reached that moment I did and oh my god, the whole club went bonkers. The fact that's instrumental works out great because people love to sing-along to this classic greasy cheeseball. I'm definitely keeping this one in that special section of my crate designated for party-rescuing: you know when you fucked up and accidentally cleared the dancefloor and you need a heavy hitter to bring it back up? This is all you need.
Thanks Electric Cowbell for the presents and for helping to keep 7'' vinyl alive.

Buy these amazing releases HERE.

R.A.P. SQUAD-De Este Lado (Craneo Kafe, 2011)

2011-10-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

As you probably already know, by reading my posts, I used to be deeply involved in the underground hip-hop scene back home, before I moved to the States. it only took me a few months living in California to become completely disenchanted with the whole state of hip-hop and eventually detach completely from that scene.
In recent years, however, I was sucked back in. I first met this one mexican guy who's a very active Spanish-language rapper in the bay Area scene and through him I started to become acquainted with everybody else and soon I was getting invited to DJ at pretty much all their gigs. I hadn't suddenly recovered my enthusiasm for hip-hop, and in all honesty, I wasn't a fan of any of the artists in this local scene, but I kept hanging out with them, mainly because of nostalgia. This tiny rap-en-español scene in the SF Bay Area reminded me a lot of the origins of my own scene back in South America in the mid-'90s, when we were just a bunch of kids (99% male) trying to build a scene from scratch, out of absolutely nothing, in an environment that was extremely unwelcoming.
It's all about that Spanish Rap Paradox that I mentioned last year on that controversial post. Rap in Spanish made in the United States is a niche within a niche and has to confront so many negative stereotypes that it's pretty much impossible for a local scene to emerge successfully. Anglo-rap fans don't pay any attention to rap in any other language because (unlike us) they're unable to appreciate music in a language they don't understand. Mainstream latinos look down at rap music with distrust, and automatically associate it with gangs (and sadly, local rappers do very little to break away from this prevalent misconception) and the few Latinos who understand and appreciate real hip-hop are often involved in the Anglo scene so they don't even know there's rap in Spanish going on in their towns.
So if you go to these events where I was invited to DJ and it's usually just a bunch of dudes (with a few girlfriends hanging out on the sides) watching each others perform. One artists goes up on stage, then comes down and becomes the audience for the next artist and so on. They get very little if any fan support.
And it's in that struggle that I find myself reflected because that's the way it used to be for us, back in my hometown, back in 1996 when we were trying to start a scene, even though we were fighting against very different opposing forces and negative stereotypes (mainly because of the overwhelming dominance of rock music).
Anyway, out from this Bay Area rap-en-español scene came R.A.P. Squad, formed by four Mexican immigrants. One of them you're probably familiar with because he was a guest in my song "Cumbia Nena" included in the Stronghold Sound's Audio Refuge Compilation. He goes by Nes and he's a really cool guy. He pretty much put together this coalition of local rappers, who were all doing their own thing, independently, in the scene and together they made this self-released debut album. Compared to the current most progressive hip-hop artists in Latin America they're still a bit behind, attached to many trite clichés, but this is just a start (not only for them but for their whole scene) and hopefully they won't lose momentum and will keep developing their own style. Check them out and support them by purchasing their album, available in CD format in select record stores throughout the bay and digitally on Amazon and everywhere else.

Quantic Really Digs Colombia

2011-10-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

Dj, producer, curator and digger extraordinaire. Quantic isone of the biggest players in current progressive Latin music and he’s not evenLatino. Born in the English countryside he made a pretty decent career for thefirst half of last decade producing soulful downtempo electronica until around2007 he got suddenly converted into Latinhood. That song, “Mi Swing EsTropical,” he did in Puerto Rico with Nickodemus and Candela Allstars was ahuge breakthrough and pretty much marked the beginning of a whole new phase inhis development as an artist, getting immersed in Latin music to the point thathe even relocated to Colombia.

Celebrating the recent release of a Best Of Quanticcompilation (out on Tru Thoughts), Will Holland, better known as Quantic, visited San Francisco, CAand there I had the chance to have a little chat backstage right before hisshow.

- So, how did you first get into Latin music?

- It happened in Puerto Rico. Nickodemus invited me to go there and record with the CandelaAllstars. That was the first time I got intouch with (Latin music). I had already a lot of music because I buy records,lots of music. But that was the first time I came in touch with actualmusicians and it was cool. It was interesting. But for me its all aboutrecords. I’ve always got introduced through digging.

- And digging took you to Colombia, where you ended upstaying.

- Yeah. I was really into Ray Pérez y sus Dementes, these records from Venezuela, and also AfreditoLinares, from Perú... and all theserecords, that kind of scene, revolved around Cali. You hear people shouting outin those records about Cali, because Cali was such a spot to go and play in the‘70s, it was like this big mecca for salsa. And my friend Beto (Soundway Records’Roberto Gyemant) assured me that there were going to be heavy records and ofcourse they were. It was interesting. It was another world. Coming from abackground of looking for funk records, reggae and stuff, it was like a wholenew universe, musically, to discover. Sometimes I don’t like the word 'digging' because it implies a certain nostalgia, maybe a separation between the presentand the past. I feel that when they look for records, some people, even friendsof mine would buy records of some artist, but if that same artist was playingin the street they wouldn’t go and talk to them.

- Maybe not in that sense, but there’s definitely anostalgic side to your music because you always approach it from a ‘60s and‘70s aesthetic. That type of sound.

- Oh yeah, definitely. You gotta understand that atthat period everything was at its best. It's like with cars, you had a periodwhen the Jaguar and all these cars were the best they could be, you know, theywere beautiful, they were hand-designed. And that’s what happened to music too.You had Fender, people making all these amazing instruments, and you had allthese young people and out of that came all these styles and I think it wasreally at the top as far the recording industry could be.

- There was definitely a creative pinnacle happening atthat time.

- Yes, totally. But I don’t wanna be nostalgic in the sensethat “oh, no today...” Because that’s the other thing, you gotta imagine thattoday there’s just as many people. They just don’t have that opportunitybecause in the ‘70s there seemed to be more of an opening for people to getinto that industry. While now I see so many talented people that don’t getaccepted as a singer-songwirter, whatever, because if they’re not singing like MarcAnthony they’re not gonna get noticed, youknow what I mean? Unless you can prove that you have the potential to sellthousands.

- There has been recently a huge shift in interest amongdiggers and producers toward old Latin music. It wasn’t just you. Do you think itwas because they simply ran out of funk and soul break-beats to sample? Allthose crates have been dug so much that they reached a point where they needed tolook somewhere else?

- I think it basically came to an end and it was also aboutlike, moving forward. There has to be evolution, it can’t just be the same oldthing. And also funk and soul really commercialized with Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, whatever. It became a big thing and a lot of people just got bored ofit, “ok, let’s try something else.” For me, personally, you look for breaks somuch that you start thinking “what’s a break?” Is it only when it goes likeboom-bap? Is that a break? Or could a break be Congolese music? It’s more aboutrhythm, finding more rhythms, rather than just American funk.

- How about the recent boom of global interest inColombia? It’s like suddenly, in the last couple of years, the whole world, butparticularly Europe and the US, discovered how amazing Colombian music is,after ignoring it for a long time.

- Yeah, I don’t know why that is. I don’t think that theyignored it. From the ‘70s, ‘80s and even into the ‘90s most of Colombian musicwas really hard to access abroad, except the crossovers like Carlos Vives and the small world music circles. Because that’sanother thing, the world music scene never did Latin American music any favors,making it softer and more like para planchar, you know. I thinkone key thing has been the internet. That’s been amazing for Colombian acts tobe able to get out and get the music heard.

- But how about the interest of European record labels inreleasing all these reissues of old Colombian music. You’ve been personallyinvolved in curating many of those compilations. And there’s an undeniablespecific interest in Colombia, which ten years ago, it wasn't happening, they were maybe focused inBrazil.

- Yes, that’s true. I think that was certainly happening inthe UK, this whole big thing for Brazil. Still goes on. Don’t know. Don’t knowwhy it happened. It seemed like the world became ready maybe. Maybe theyweren’t ready for it before. Maybe it’s a hearing thing. I had Colombianrecords maybe seven or eight years ago that I just didn’t understand back then.It didn’t interest me. And now I hear the same thing today, and with adifferent understanding I can really like it. The human hear- it’s justpsychological, you are hearing the same thing but your interpretation changes.

- How do you feel about the whole ñu-cumbia movement?

- I think it’s cool. Like in anything that explodes soquickly there’s a lot of shit and there’s a lot of good stuff as well. There’rea lot of people sampling Andrés Landero,Los Gaiteros. And that’s great.But there’s a whole lot of musicians in Colombia that can still play thatstyle. Colombian folkloric music hasn’t changed, generally speaking it’s prettymuch the same thing that it was a hundred years ago, you know, gaitas, cumbias.Also, a lot of the times when I hear the new mash-up things, if the originalwas so good, why did you need to do that? Why did you need to put a beat tothat old record to kind of somehow make it acceptable to the gringos? Why isthat? That doesn’t need to happen, people should learn to accept it how it is.

- Do you think there’s a difference between the Colombianmusic Europeans are interested in, and the Colombian music that Colombiansare interested in?

- I think that’s an interesting point, it definitelyhappens. There’s kind of a wide gap. Let’s face it, just like the Britishabroad and the Argentineans abroad, there’s people that will only be interestedin the famous Argentinean hits that remind them of back home, they’re notinterested in something that’s very leftfield. There’s certainly a nostalgia inColombians and Latinos abroad in general and they wanna hear salsa, they don’twanna hear these obscure things. It’s the same. Look man, I go to Colombia tobuy records and I’m looking for cumbias and rare Fruko records and the salesman is saying to me “look youknow this English rock record from the ‘70s?” because they have a bigappreciation for British rock from the ‘70s, some that even I never heardabout.

- Did it shock you at first, when you got to Colombia, tofind out that the average youth down there was more interested in the musiccoming from Europe and the US rather than cumbia and their own roots?

- Colombians are the first to admit that they value moresomething that’s coming from the outside in. And when somebody from abroadcomes in and plays their music then it puts value on it, there’s this foreigninterest in it. It’s a weird phenomenon. It’s definitely a post-colonialphenomenon. You could write a thesis on that.

- I’m of the idea that it was that initial interest of foreignersin cumbia what ignited the whole ñu-cumbia movement coming out of Mexico andArgentina.

- The danger with cumbia is that we have this kind of buzzword, cumbia, cumbia... But there’s a lot of shit that isn’t necessary cumbia.There’s a lot of stuff, like the Argentinean stuff, a lot of it is great, but alot of just isn’t cumbia. It’s reggae, or dubstep, whatever.

- As long as it has a güiro loop, anything is consideredcumbia.

- Exactly. And I think also we have to remember theimportance of the African drum patterns. It’s like a language that speaks tothose people, and the Costeños in Colombia, they hear that. It’s a pattern thatspeaks to them. So when they hear cumbia from like Argentina it’s just likethey’re mystified. I play that shit to like Aníbal Velázquez and the heavyweight guys from the coast and theyare confused. Because the feel is so different.

- But that’s also because cumbia evolved in differentdirections and assimilated to each country’s local culture in different ways.

- Totally. And that’s beautiful too. That’s lovely. It’s nota bad thing.

- Somebody on my blog left a comment saying that you andFrente Cumbiero were going to work on a project together, recoding at theDiscos Fuentes studios in Medellín. I read that and I almost came in my pants.

- Yes, (laughs) we’ve got founding from the British counciland it’s still in pre-production what we’re gonna do, but we’re renting Fuentesfor like two, three weeks. I’ve been there a lot, it’s cool, they rebuilt thestudio in the ‘80s so it’s a little bit different to what it was, but it’sstill the same basic concept.

- And I imagine you’re gonna invite some musicians fromthat era who are still around. Right?

- Yes. Michi Sarmiento.Afredito Linares, AníbalVelázquez, Pedro Beltrán. The heavyweights. Trying to. Let’s see.

- Are you planning to release this through Tru Thoughtsor Soundway?

- Might be for Soundway. We’ve got to see. We’ve got to getit done first. It’s always a gamble when you record. You never know how is itgoing to work out. Should be good.

- So, you live in Cali, and you’re definitely familiarwith the song “Las Caleñas son como las flores,” right? That song pretty muchsays that women in Cali don’t put out easily, they like to play hard to get.And that’s a pretty well spread preconception about Colombian women in general.Did you experience that yourself or being a foreigner gave you a special pass?

- (Laughs) No comment. No comment. I don’t know if they’re hard to get. Idon’t know about that, but they’re certainly beautiful.

- Living in Colombia, do you miss anything from backhome? I assume you don’t miss the food.

- Well, you know what? I do. Because that’s a big myth aboutEngland. If you go to London, yes, the food is terrible, but I’m from thecountry and the food is really nice. I have a little cache of English mustardand tea-bags and kind of things that I restock periodically.

- Can you get fish and chips there?

- No. I do my own though.

- I don’t know if you’ve seen it. There’s a Vice TV documentary about how young men in northern Colombia get sexually initiatedwith female donkeys (because, once again, women play too hard to get). And I always wondered why are there so many cumbia songsabout donkeys. Do you think there’s a correlation there?

- I haven’t had a personal insight on that. But I’m sure itgoes on man. I was watching the news once and it’s a terribly story about theserobbers, ladrones, who robbed a Circusin la costa, in a little town andthey stole the sound-system and various other things from the circus and whilethey were there they took the donkey from the circus and they raped her. And Iwas thinking, I was watching the news and I was like, “OK, that’s really bad,I’m sorry for the donkey, but fuck, man, how did they know that the donkey wasripe?”

- Because they’re experts! They’ve been fucking donkeyssince they were kids.

- I don’t know. I think that’s kind of myth.

- How about the connection between cumbia and donkey fucking?

- I’ve been doing a good job recording with costeños and I have never asked them. And I should maybe notmake comment.

- Right, I don’t wanna ruin your reputation, you need tobe able to go back and record that album with Frente Cumbiero.

- And they’re gonna say, “hey, what did you say? That we allfuck donkeys?” No. No.

CHRIS READ-Ritmos Colombianos/Disco Cumbia (Breakin Bread, 2011)

2011-09-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems to me like the whole ñu-cumbia thing has been winding down lately, especially considering that a label like ZZK records hadn't release a thing since 2010 (OK, Chancha's vinyl came out in 2011 but it was digitally released in late 2010).
But while the output in Latin American digital cumbia and the interest in it by hipster blogs may have decreased this year, there was a notorious increase in releases (many of them fortunately in vinyl and particularly in 7'' format) sampling cumbia by DJ's and record labels from New York and Europe that were not particularly interested in Latin music just a couple of years ago.
It's a very interesting phenomenon and I'm happily welcoming it. DJ and producers from the break-beats/hip-hop camps, like the british Chris Read here, getting introduced late to cumbia and remixing it from their funky sensibility, making it b-boy friendly.
Some may argue that he basically just sampled the same traditional cumbia song on both sides of the single and that said song, "La Cumbia Cienaguera," is like the basic of the basics of the genre, the very first cumbia that pops up when you search for cumbia and that it has been already sampled and remixed hundreds of times before. But, while all that is true, I don't think that takes any value away from these two magnificent mixes, which I'll be spinning, for sure, in my sets starting tomorrow.
Other more politicized critics will read this phenomenon as another sign of global Anglo cultural imperialism, and complain about how these white Anglosaxon artists are profiting of this Latin American music style while the many talented DJ's and producers who pioneered the genre in Latin America rarely get this exposure and treatment. And sure, that might be true to a certain extent, but also, as I pointed out many times on this blog, ñu-cumbia would've never picked up in Latin America and become a successful global scene if it wasn't for the work done by gringos visiting or living down there (Señor Coconut, Richard Blair, Up Bustle & Out, El G, Quantic, Oro11) which encouraged local artist to follow suit.
And to be honest, I could never honestly support that line of thinking because, even though I'm from Latin America, I'm almost as foreign to the cumbia culture as the next British guy, because I grew up listening almost exclusively to American hip-hop and England's acid house and while cumbia was crossing over and becoming commercially successful back in my hometown I was way to obsessed with The KLF to pay any genuine attention to it. So I could never take that stand and complain about these gringos getting in the band-wagon of ñu-cumbia, especially not when they do it so much better than us, proof of it is this amazing couple of tracks in this must-have single. So, keep them comming!

Get it here.

Digging Cumbia Argentina-Vinyl Rips

2011-09-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

From an international perspective, Argentine cumbia didn't become interesting until the late '90s/early '00s with the emergence of the ghetto-fabulous cumbia villera and almost simultaneously ñu-cumbia, or cumbia digital. But cumbia was a very well established genre of commercial dance music in Argentina since the '60s and had to suffer many mutations to adapt to the local market, starting from the pure Colombian original style, until attaining its own local character.
As an average white middle-class big city boy in Eurocentric Buenos Aires, I grew up systematically turning my back on cumbia, dismissing it as "music for maids and bus-drivers." But as much as my generation would like to deny it, cumbia was there, it was very present in our backyards, subconsciously influencing us. Going back to the vinyl records of that era I find myself confronted with mixed feelings, a sort of nostalgia for an era I could never be nostalgic about because I was decisively not part of it. Still, many of these songs unleash instant flashbacks to precise moments of my childhood because we used to sing them, mostly as a joke, even when we didn't know that type of music was called cumbia, sometimes because they crossed over to the mainstream as soccer hooligan chants, as mentioned on this related post.
I put together this selection of Argentine pressings of cumbia--not exclusively recorded by Argentinean artists or artist living in Argentina. It's an unfinished work, needs a lot more work, but a first step into trying to figure out, through vinyl digging, some of the history of Argentine cumbia and how it developed to eventually give birth to cumbia villera and ñu-cumbia. I only ripped some tracks from each album, the ones I found either more interesting or more representative. Enjoy and share!

CUARTETO IMPERIAL - Lamento Negro/El Zurdo José (CBS, date unkwon): The 45 RPM single with the big hole was not a particularly popular format in Argentina, the way it was in other cumbia-friendly countries (Colombia, Mexico, Peru) during the '70s and '80s. Instead, you find this 7'' records with little hole that play in 33RPM. Here we have a good example of the songs that helped popularize cumbia in Argentina during the '70s, thanks to Cuarteto Imperial, who were actually Colombians living in Buenos Aires, and playing cumbia still in a very traditionally Colombian style. Cumbia was still very rural in its topics and aesthetics and very afro in its rhythms, those qualities would eventually move aside to make room for the characteristic Argentine cumbia style developed in the following two decades.

LOS WAWANCO - Volumen #8 (Odeon Pops, date unknown): Along with Cuarteto Imperial, Los Wawanco are considered the main pioneers in bringing Cumbia to Argentina and making it a popular dance music during the '60s and '70s. What differentiate these guys from the other pioneers was that the group had members from all over Latin America (Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina), so their musical influences were a lot more diverse than the traditional Colombian cumbia, even though that was the main genre they played during their beginnings. Here we have them in a 4 song, 33RPM EP, doing covers of Colombian standards ("El Pescador") and a Dominican merengue (however, it's labeled Colombian merengue on the cover art).

LOS DE COLOMBIA - Ritmo y más ritmo (Philips, date unknown): Just look at that groovy cover! And the music is not that bad either, well, at least some of it. Of course, the Los De Colombia are five ugly dudes, who probably aren't even Colombian, and those girls are just some random hot models, but wow, I feel like framing this one. Their repertoire consist on mostly Colombian style cumbias, but there're a few odd numbers, a bolero, a translated cover of Sonny Rollins, a lot of tango/milonga style singing and even a canaval murga (pretty bad one though). I only ripped a few of the strongest cumbia tracks, the instrumentals have some pretty good loops.

LOS LUCEROS COLOMBIANOS CON RITMO - Fiesta en Bogotá (Armar, 1974): This is just me speculating, but I think there was a time when claiming to be Colombian gave you more credibility if you were trying to play cumbia in Argentina. That's why there're so many groups with names like this. I don't know who they are, maybe they were Colombians who followed the steps of Cuarteto Imperial and relocated in Argentina, maybe they are Argentineans pretending to be Colombians and playing mostly Colombian style cumbias. There's however a candombe (Afro-Uruguayan rhythm) listed in their repertoire and a song where they say "here in Argentina" in the chorus (even when the album title is Party in Bogotá). So I have my doubts.

MARIO Y SUS DIAMANTES - Lo último de (Sicamericana, date unknown): An oddity here. Instrumental organ-lead tropidelia by a Venezuelan artist, pressed in Argentina. It swings between extremes, from really horrible most of the time to really amazing in a few moments. There're some covers of Colombian classic cumbias, like Calixto Ochoa's "La Comadre" and Eliseo Herrera's "La Manzana" (which I've already posted in a previous batch of vinyl rips, in a vocal version by Dominica y Su Conjunto--this version here, however, has a scratch so it pops and skips a few times, but it still has an great break and if you really want to, you can easily edit the pops out). There're also some boring ass boleros and bossa nova covers that I didn't bother to rip and honestly, most of the album sounds like carrousel music but then you have an original number like "Las Puertas" and it's super dope.

LOS COSTEÑOS - A Gozar la Cumbia (Billboard, 1977): Once again, I don't know if these guys are really costeños from Colombia, or they are just Argentineans pretending, but if it's the second case, they pull it off really well. This album includes all the colombian cumbia songs that I knew as a kid, before the Argentine cumbia pop crossover of 1989--although I didn't know the genre was called cumbia yet. To me they were just funny popular songs that people in the country's inner provinces danced to back then, and I discovered them through my cousin, who used to sing them without really understanding the meaning of the lyrics that talked about places like Santa Marta and Barranquilla, towns in the northern coast of Colombia that we didn't even know existed. It also includes a cover of "La Pollera Amarilla" (an answer record of sorts to the über-famous "La Pollera Colorá"?) that was later popularized in Argentina during the early '90s cumbia explosion when covered by Gladys La Bomba Tucumana (it was her version that made it to the soccer stadiums and it was sung along with distorted lyrics by hooligans for most part of the '90s). All these sound very Colombian in style, but then you have "Merceditas," a traditional Argentine folklore song, so I don't know...

WAWANCO - Unicamente (EMI, 1977): Here we have an early example of cumbia diverting away from its Colombian roots to acquire a more Argentine character. Incorporating elements from local milonga, "lunfardo" (vernacular Argentine slang) and references to current Argentine pop culture (mentions of national sport heroes Guillermo Vilas and Carlos Monzón), helped Los Wawanco become the biggest tropical music powerhouse in Argentina during the '70s and their influence can still be seen decades later. This album includes the original "Cumbia Bohemia" that would later be successfully covered in the '90s by the biggest female cumbia singer of that decade, Gilda. There're some tracks where they still go back to the Colombian roots, paseo, gaita and vallenato, but for the most part the album is marked by a clear intention of argentinizing cumbia.

LOS DIABLOS DE LA CUMBIA - Creadores de la cumbia metálica (Sicamericana, 1985): Another oddity that has the word fail written all over it. Way before cumbia villera achieved street-cred by importing the aesthetics of hip-hop mixed in with soccer hooliganism, these bunch of wankers were trying -unsuccessfully- to merge cumbia with the then-prevailing hard-rock/metal aesthetics with similar intentions. Cumbia wasn't rural, wasn't Afro and wasn't Colombian anymore, by now it was a local pop music genre that was gradually becoming more and more urban, so palm trees were replaced by graffitied walls. Still, these guys were mostly a joke and had no rock credibility so nobody ever took them seriously, particularly because their cumbia had almost no "metal" at all (as they claim in the title) and also because they made cheesy covers of cheesy TV show songs. It wasn't until the mid-'90s with Los Auténticos Decadentes, Bersuit and Agrupación Mamanis that cumbia an rock finally found a commercially successful meeting point.

CLAN TROPICAL - Todo al 3 (Magenta, 1991): Generic cumbia compilation from Magenta, the label that pretty much monopolized commercial cumbia in Argentina during the '90s. Four bands, two of which are horrible (Luz de Luna and Los Duendes de Santa Fé) and two that barely pass for historical interest only (Grupo Angora, Los Diamantes), all have in common one thing, the same manager: a Peruvian guy named "El Cholo" who put together the comp. Sometime along the '80s there was in Argentina of a considerable switch from the classic Colombian style of cumbia to the cheesier side of Peruvian chicha (minus the psychedelic part) brought over by an wave of working-class Peruvian immigrants. Chicha pioneers Los Mirlos had such a success in Argentina during the early '90s that they established a permanent local branch of their band for the Argentine market. Traditional Colombian cumbia instruments as gaitas and accordion are nowhere to be found here, replaced by electric guitar and keyboards and lyrics are corny to the max.

LOS CARTAGENEROS - El Sonido De Los Carta (Magenta, 1990): "Ni De Piedra Ni Madera" by Los Cartageneros was one of the biggest hits in Argentine cumbia of the late '80s/early '90s and one of the first of many cumbia hits that crossed over to the mainstream media and dancefloors. It's also quite significant for me because it's the first cumbia which lyrics I memorized after seeing them perform it at a TV show (although I'm pretty sure that was at least a couple of years before 1990). Even though in their name they claim to be from Cartagena (Colombia) I don't think any of the members of this Argentine band are any more Colombian than the Mexican group Supergrupo Colombia.

ERIC BOBO & LATIN BITMAN-Welcome To The Ritmo Machine (Nacional Records, 2011)

2011-09-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

I've been anxiously awaiting this release for months and now that Ana Tijoux's second album on Nacional has been pushed back to early 2012 (it was originally announced for November, 2011) I have a feeling this is gonna be one of the strongest contenders for best album of the year in The Hard Data awards.
I'm a confessed fan of both Latin Bitman and Eric Bobo and I've been following their careers closely for a while now. Back in 2002 I discovered Bitman through the innovative Robar Es Natural signed by the then-duo Bitman & Roban which we nominated for best album of the year in my La Banda Elástica days, way before anybody else in the US ever talked about him (or anybody else in the progressive Chilean hip-hop scene).
Eric Bobo, the son of the legendary Latin soul pioneer Willie Bobo, has been touring with hip-hop artists as a live percussionist since forever, from the Beastie Boys during their Ill Communication days to Cypress Hill. It was with the later that I had a chance to meet him back in 1996 when I was giving my first, timid, baby-steps into music journalism. He was, in fact, the first international English-speaking artist I've ever interviewed.
So, as you can imagine, I have a lot of love for these two. Both had been in the Nacional Records roster for a while but neither received the level of exposure they deserved compared to other artists of the same label (with four releases on Nacional Records, Bitman has still to come and tour the US for the first time), but with this ambitious collaboration album, that will be reverted. I hope.
I mean, after we saw labelmate Ana Tijoux breaking all the language/market barriers and getting unprecedented levels of attention from the Anglo (and specialized hip-hop) media, there's absolutely no reason why this album would fail to achieve the same. Specially considering the top-notch guests MC's dropping rhyming knowledge (amongst whom we have, of course, Ana Tijoux, albeit in an odd pairing with Psycho Realm's Sick Jacken).
I had humongous expectations for this project and so far it hasn't disappointed me (I received an advance copy yesterday, I've only listened to it twice, and I haven't had a chance to test it on my DJ sets yet). The combination of Bitman's proficiency in crafting funky break beats and his professed love to the Brazilian cool along with Bobo's restless percussion is sublime and I'd even argue that most of the times, the guest vocalists are just an unnecessary added value. Of course everybody loves Jurassic 5's Chali 2Na, and Cypress Hill's Sen Dog is a likable character as well, but Control Machete's Pato? Having access to the most avant-guard MC's of the Spanish Language in their vicinity, why did you see the need to go so old school?
Anyway, as already stated, this is not an album held together by guest stars and it stands very well on its own with just the talent of both Eric Bobo and Bitman, so that doesn't matter. Now seriously, if there was one Nacional Records release that would benefit of vinyl pressing this is it, right here, look no further. It has all the potential in the world to cross-over to the beat-digging, vinyl-loving, true-school hip-hop fans and become a collector's item. Nacional slept on many others that would've been successful on vinyl (Bomba Estéreo, Ana Tijoux), I really hope they don't sleep on this one or I'll be tempted to break into their offices, Pinochet style, and take over operations in a record label coup d'état.

Watch out for this release dropping in November, 2011.

TRES CORONAS-La Música Es Mi Arma (Parcero, 2011)

2011-09-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I heard about Rocca. It was back in the second half of the '90s, maybe 1997, and I was selling my hip-hop fanzine at the park in Buenos Aires, next to my buddy who sold bootlegged American rap CDs off a blanket on the floor and we were kinda like the tiny epicenter of the whole still miniscule emerging scene. A who-is-who of the scene movers and doers used to gather around us and discuss the present and future of rap in Spanish. Then this one day a renown b-boy and respected freestyler showed up with a portable CD player and he was all hyped up over his recent discovery. He had a bootlegged copy of Rocca's solo debut Entre Deux Mondes and it was as if he had a prophetic vision of the future. "This is it, man! This is how to rap in Spanish correctly."
For ages local MC's had been struggling with adapting our native language to the rap flow and most of the results up to that point were laughable. They either had a very old-school cheesy flow, or they came out as Chicano wannabe's imitating Cypress Hill's wacky accent, but nobody had found yet a way to flow naturally, with our own characteristic pronunciation. Rocca's album had only one song in Spanish, the rest was in French, but that was enough to unleash a revolution in the way we rapped.
The fact that he came from France and he was very respected in the French rap scene was instrumental too. Had he released that same song in Colombia, we would've probably skipped it. But as authentic Argentinians we were unapologetically Eurocentric and we really looked up toward French hip-hop as the epitome of class, sophistication and just pure dopeness. I mean, yeah, of course New York's hip-hop was tremendously influential, but claiming you knew French rap, and dropping the stage-names of the rappers in IAM or NTM when you enumerated your favorite MC's gave you instant cred in the game. People here in the US, when I tell them about this, have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that us, rap fans in Argentina who didn't understand a word of French, used to fetishize French rap so much. But for kids who didn't understand English either and grew up listening to Public Enemy and NWA, French rap was just rap that sounded amazingly good to our ears, something somehow more elegant and refined than the American average.
I'd even go as far as stating that it was the fact that she was French and rapped in French what gave Ana Tijoux, back in those same days, her initial instant buzz and set her apart of the herd to later become the indisputable dopest female MC of the subcontinent.
Anyway, going back to my story, Rocca blew all our minds with his rap in Spanish back then, because he had a French rap flow which adapted a lot better to our language than the Anglo flow. My friend's prophecy however didn't realize, because less than a year later it was the Spain's rap golden-agers (7 Notas 7 Colores, CPV, Violadores del Verso, etc) who ended up changing the way we rapped once and for ever.
Still, Rocca was remembered by many as a pioneer of rap en español's new school. From doing a first album that had only one song in Spanish he went to a second one where he had only one song in French and since then Spanish became his main rapping language.
Then he moved to New York City and formed Tres Coronas. At that point I still had hopes for rap in Spanish entering the impermeable US market and if somebody could do it and do it right, that was Rocca with his new NY-based group. Or so I thought.
I wasn't the only one though. Toy Selectah-directed Machete Records, the urban Latino branch of Univeral Records, signed them for a massive release that was expected to blow up and kick-start a whole movement.
However, that never happened for two main reasons: first, one of the three members of what was originally a trio left the group somewhere between the recording of their debut album and its release. Now even the group's name didn't make sense. Second, and more importantly, the album came out in 2006, amid the boom of reggaetón. Reggaetón devoured the Latin mainstream and took away any chance Spanish rap had to ever cross over in the US. Now people thought reggaetón was the Latin response to American hip-hop, and real Spanish hip-hop fans and artists were collectively driven into madness by the well-spread wrong assumption.
Unwilling to let them go unnoticed after spending so much money in them, the label even fabricated some feature appearances and collaborations with reggaetoneros, but it was too late, the damage was done. The same commercial Latin radios that back then played reggaetón 24/7 wouldn't even consider playing actual hip-hop.
Jump a few years to present day and we find Rocca and PNO, the two remaining members of Tres Coronas, relocated in their ancestral land, Colombia. La Musica Es Mi Arma is their latest release and fortunately finds the rappers more interested in exploring the old traditions of Afro-Colombian music than trying to compete for mainstream exposure with Calle 13. That battle, we know now, will never be won. But still, they have their loyal supporters and orthodox rap heads who respect Rocca as one of the biggest names in Spanish rap world-wide. And I'm one of them. It didn't blow my mind in the way Rocca did fourteen years ago when I first heard him at that park on the headphones of my friend's CD player, but I still give him props for his career and for digging into the cumbia roots.

Buy it on Itunes.

LATIN BEAT (Putumayo, 2011)

2011-09-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

We tend to dismiss Putumayo's compilations as music-for-white-people-who-don't-really-buy-music-regularly-but-want-to-be-down-with-some-"ethnic"-stuff-to-feel-more-connected-to-their-idea-of-something-that's-"real"-so-they-buy-these-impulsively-at-the-whole-foods-market-and-play-it-as-background-during-their-dinner-parties-to-pretend-they-are-also-world-travelers-like-their-guests.
And while all of the above is inevitably true, I happen to be defender of these compilations because I found them valuable, useful and also quite accomplished in their own sense.
I haven't done so in a few years, but I used to DJ a lot at restaurants/lounge bars, where people don't ever dance and the DJ booth is just an added value to make the venue look hip and an excuse to charge more for the drinks. I remember one of my very first days DJing at one of these places, I asked one of the other resident DJs what he recommended to play and he said "I play all Putumayo music." As in: attitude-free feel-good music with foreign elements but a familiar Westernized song structure that makes it easy to digest by the neofite gringo listener. I had a handful of Putumayo's comps and I instantly added them to my playlist and became staples of my lounge DJ sets. People love them, and by people here I mean restaurant managers and ceviche-eating white people (who are inherently more sophisticated than burrito-eating white people, right?).
The thing is, regardless of how much of a music snob I could ever pretend to be, I have to give credit to Putumayo compilations for continuously introducing me to new, interesting, artists that I didn't even know existed. It's kind of embarrassing to say you "discovered" this or that band from a CD that people pick up with their chai latte at the local coffee shop, but I have no problem admitting it openly. That's the accomplished part I was referring to earlier: these guys do a remarkable job scrutinizing infinite piles of music to find the perfect combo for a complete-while-concise compilation. I don't think I could do it better. I don't think I'd ever be able to select an introduction to a genre in just eleven tracks, I need twenty five, at least.
This new Latin Beat comp is presented, in the press release, as something innovative within the label's succulent catalog, but in all honestly, it's just one more Putumayo compilation of classic Putumayo music, and most of the tracks could be easily interchangeable with the ones on other similar comps like Latin Groove, Latin Dance Party, Latin Radio, Latin Banquet (I'm pulling up these names from the top of my head, so excuse me if I'm bullshitting, but you get the point).
There's an obvious predominance of Colombian music, following the current global fetish and there's a handful of Cuban songs. There're also some from unexpected corners of the planet (some guys in New Zealand doing something that sounds straight-outta that Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream remixes comp) and there's unfortunately, nothing from Brazil. Oh, and there's a ñu-cumbia by Texas' Charanga Cakewalk, the only artists in the whole disc that I was familiar with before. All the rest, I've never heard about, and that's, once again, where the value of this CD is to be found.
This was a double release with an African Beat comp that I also recommend but I won't be reviewing on this blog because it's not Latin But Cool. Both are available digitally too, in case you are embarrassed of purchasing CDs at a store where people wear sandals and base their diet on quinoa.

Buy it here.

GRUPO 2000-El Destape (Masstropicas, 2011)

2011-08-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

Man, I need to try some of that ayahuasca! I've heard this guy talking about his ayahuasca experience the other day and it was almost as trippy as doing it. Well, probably not even close, but it painted a very tangible picture of what it's like and I want it. If I have to fly down to fucking Peru and take a canoe up the river into the Amazonian jungle for three days to do so, I'll do it. But I much rather do it near home, somewhere where I can plug my record player and listen to this album while I trip my balls off.
Grupo 2000 did some crazy psychedelic chichas back in the mid '70s in Peru, but they never achieved any commercial success and faded into oblivion. In recent years their records became sought-after cult items by chicha collectors in part because they are extremely rare and most of them didn't survive the collapse of the vinyl format in the '90s. This guy from Massachusetts went down to Peru and somehow got ahold of the original master tapes of one of their most legendary recordings and is now reissuing it in LP format for the first time outside of Peru.
I didn't dig Masstropicas previous release that much because it was more focus on the later dominant style of chicha, full of singing with horrible cheesy lyrics (with the exception of a couple of instrumental percussion-heavy tracks that made the record a worth the purchase anyway). This new one however, is mostly all jungle frenzy ayahuasca-inspired musical trips with very minimal vocals, if any. That's the best chicha music has to offer, hypnotic fuzzy guitars and crazy up-beat percussion to take you into a dancing trance.
If you bought the Roots of Chicha comp that Barbés put together and you are still thirsty for more, look no further, this is the next step into the journey towards the amazonian psycho-funk. If you are already a chicha fan, I don't need to convince you, you know you're gonna buy this one. Oh, and keep an eye out for some exciting upcoming Masstropicas releases on 7'' singles!

Support vinyl labels. Buy it here.

GUN SELECTAH-Como un Perro/Villa Ghetto (FOF Music, 2011)

2011-08-28T11:58:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure this is the first time a tune by Toy Selectah is pressed in 7'' vinyl, so I had to get my hands on it as soon as I saw it available online.
Gun Selectah is the merger of the aforementioned Mexican über-producer and godfather of ñu-cumbia with the Texan much hyped about dubstep wonderkid Mexicans With Guns. The later has already delivered a 7'' release earlier this year on Sones Throw so he's not really new to the format. And as you all know, I'm a sucker for everything pressed in this format, specially if it has any cumbia element, so this was a no brainer.
What I'm not really into is the whole dubstep thing. I like some of it, I like the wobble-wobble sounds, but I can't really enjoy it for more than one or two songs at the time. And that's the key problem I have with the whole genre, because of its extreme tempo (either too fast or too slow, depending on how you count it) it's hard to mix with anything else other than more dubstep and if you have an eclectic DJ set that covers from the 90 BPM range to 125 BPM as I do, then where the fuck am I gonna blend this 160/80 shit in? I can't. And I'd love to play this two tracks, but honestly I don't see myself doing so unless I play them in 33rpm, but then they are way too gloomy and pretty much undanceable. I don't know, I still haven't tried either way, I just got this the other night and I haven't had a chance to mix it live. Who knows, maybe it ends up becoming a hit in rebajada mode at 117 BPM. Anyway, support the few people that are still putting out music in this format!

Buy it HERE.

ARMAMENTALES-Fábrica de Memorias (Sudamétrica, 2011)

2011-08-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

Mustafá Yoda's Imaquinar was for many the best hip-hop album ever recorded in Argentina. And I'm not just saying this because I was close friends with the guy and came out from the same crew. Most of the critics would agree on this.
Armamentales' Fábrica de Memorias is a sequel of sorts to that 2008 classic, recorded by two of the finest disciples of Mustafá Yoda: Difuzor and PMO, and released under the same label.
Now, I've never met these guys, but listening to their debut album I feel as if did, because as I mentioned, we all came out from that same school of hip-hop militance that in the late nineties reshaped the underground scene of my hometown. So I totally understand where they're coming from, and why they do what they do the way they do. And from that point of view, I love it.
But I also have the outsider's perspective. Because since then, I've confessedly outgrew and left behind my dogmatic approach at hip-hop culture and all that narrow-minded purist b-boy mentality. I think DJing, and particularly DJing professionally, for mixed crowds, made me appreciate hip-hop in a completely different way. While before I was more focused on the message-centered hip-hop for the head, I nowadays look mainly for the funky catchy beats that can move a crowd and that can be specially enjoyed by people who don't necessarily understand the language those rhymes has been written on, and the stuff that aims to take hip-hop into the next step of the evolution by mixing it with other genres, rather than sticking to the classic boom-bap formula. And that's where this album, as all the other previous releases of Sudamétrica, would fail.
However, saying that they fail is rather unfair, because, by no accounts it was their purpose when recording this to make anybody dance or reach foreign language crowds. These guys have a well established base of loyal followers who dig this type of conscious hip-hop, who are still idealizing the 90's Wu-Tang sound and aesthetics and never got on all the post-50 Cent, post-Kanye new school crap. So they don't need anybody else, they're content preaching to the choir. And maybe if I was still down there, I'd still be going out with them at night to bomb the city with our spray cans and I'd totally have this playing on my headphones.
I still, in fact, have my Wu-Fam play-list on my Ipod and pop it every once in a while, specially when I feel nostalgic and I have a long urban walk at night and while I listen to it I draw imaginary parallels where Mustafá is sort of the RZA of that posse and Armamentales are the Killarmy (by the way, Killarmy where my favorite of all the Wu affiliates). But then I come back to reality, my surrounding reality at least, and I realize that nobody cares about those cats anymore. The days of doing those long-ass cryptic verses with virtually no hooks over gloomy down-tempo stripped down dirty beats are over. The new generation doesn't get it and the old generation is only interested in the stuff that came out back then for nostalgic value, but not willing to keep supporting what those artists are doing nowadays (that's why you have super-talented rappers like GZA doing tours of "only Liquid Swords" songs and bullshit like that, sad). But apparently that doesn't happen back in Argentina, where, thanks to people like Mustafá and his acolytes, that style is more the rule than the exception. That seed that I was partly instrumental in planting back then, is still growing strong.

Album currently available internationally only on bandcamp. Itunes and other digital vendors available soon.

BIO RITMO-La Verdad (Electric Cowbell, 2011)

2011-08-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

Last year I reviewed a 7'' single by Bio Ritmo and I didn't know it back then, but that tune, "Dina's Mambo" soon became one of my favorite warm-up tracks in permanent rotation in my vinyl DJ sets and still remains in that status today. I don't know exactly what is it about it but I love it.
Bio Ritmo is essentially an alternative salsa band from an odd place, Richmond, Virginia. If you know me or read my blog, you know as a DJ I don't like playing salsa in my sets. Not only because of my aversion toward salsa dancers and their lack of understanding/respect for DJ work, but also because I tend to DJ at mixed crowd events and playing a salsa in your set can be a risky show-stopper. You have the crowd dancing to everything else, you play a salsa (usually because some annoying Venezuelan is busting your balls all night begging you to do so) and all of a sudden the dance-floor gets divided between those few who know how to dance salsa and like to show off their moves, and the rest who are intimidated/alienated into becoming simply observers. Soon after that it's your job as a DJ to try to pick up the party and reunite the crowd with something the majority can relate to.
Now regarding the music itself, I have nothing against it per se. I don't like the modern, cheesy, mainstream pop salsa, of course (my DJ-for-hire contract states that money being provided I'll play anything the customer wants... except Marc Anthony). But I have lots of respect for the old school, from the times when salsa was more street and more afro. I have the feeling that the Bio Ritmo guys share this view with me and that's the sound and aesthetics they're trying to recreate here, but with a modern twist. Breaking with all the clichés of the typical salsa bar band that plays covers of classics and standards simply to make those mentioned annoying fuckers dance, Bio Ritmo does their own thing, in their own style and play good, original music that can be easily appreciated by open-minded people who are not necessarily into salsa at all.
Fuck those salsa orthodox fans anyway. Bio Ritmo plays salsa but leans heavily on the funkier side of it, and has no issues blending in some Brazilian samba or dub, and that's the main reason I love them. Oh and there's another reason: their album is getting pressed on 12'' vinyl (and distributed by Fat Beats). Right, bitches! The only current salsa band in the US releasing vinyl! Learn a lesson or two from these guys all you clowns out there with the silk shirts and shiny shoes doing your choreographed ballroom dance twists and turns and making DJ lives impossible. Bio Ritmo rocks and it's the only salsa band that gets a free pass here in The Hard Data.

NATION BEAT-Growing Stone (Barbés Records, 2011)

2011-08-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

A DJ friend of mine was telling me the other night about this new girlfriend of his and how she's into country music. He mentioned something about that possibly becoming an issue if the relationship keeps developing. So far they're only in the get-to-know-each-other phase so music compatibility hasn't been a big issue yet, but knowing my friend's predilection for the funkier side of Afro-Latin beats, I imagine he has to have some tolerance, right? I don't know if I could stand a country music listener more than a week, even if she gives the best head on earth and looks like Scarlett Johansson. But I guess my friend is a lot more open minded than I am. For me, country music, in all its forms and subgenres, is deep in the forbidden zone, next to christian music and Mexican regional. I'm pretty open about everything else, but those three are strictly off limits.
So I got this album the other day and uploaded it to my ipod to listen on my way to work and all I knew about the group is that they did some innovative fusion of Brazilian music, which I tend to love in pretty much all its forms, with some other American-grown genres listed, none of which rung any bells to me. I play the first track, which in reality was the last one of the album, and ew, it was straight up country hick crap. Instinctively, I lowered the volume of my ipod, fearing some people on the train could listen to what I was listening and assume that I was some redneck racist Christian republican or something like that, because that's what I tend to assume of all people who listen to country crap (stereotypes are a real time saver!).
Anyway, the rest of the album was not really that bad, when she sings in Portuguese over Afro-Brazilian percussion it sounds actually pretty good, but every time the country shit reappeared I was forced to press skip. Call me narrow minded, prejudice, asshole, whatever you want, but I can't stand that shit and if there's a place in this world where the inner-coolness of Brazilian music meets with the utterly uncool country, I wanna be as far as possible from such place.
Now regarding my DJ friend, I guess he and his girlfriend could find some middle-ground here and live happily ever after. Or not.

Roots Of Chicha (Barbés Records, 2011)

2011-08-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

Came out a bit late, but it's still valid. The Roots Of Chicha, the compilation that started it all, is finally available on vinyl!
In 2006 New York-based Barbés records released the first volume of this series and that was enough to unleash a world-wide chicha fever that even pre-dates the crossing-over of ñu-cumbia to the Northerh Hemisphere's DJ community.
Only one thing was missing, and I pointed it out last year when the second volume of these series came out: vinyl. CDs are ok, but DJs want vinyl and finding original chicha music in that format in the English-speaking world is very hard, unless you're willing to pay exorbitant amounts in shipping to some speculating asshole on Ebay and trust the very unreliable post offices of South America.
Barbés totally slept on that one. And they should've never underestimated the power vinyl, specially when your target audience is mainly DJs and diggers/collectors. Spain's Vampi Soul saw the opportunity and jumped in last year, dropping an amazing chicha comp with a mind-blowing packaging and great mastering quality and for a while it seemed that they had won the battle for chicha reissues supremacy. They even won the Best Cover Art in The Hard Data Awards for 2010.
Knowing this, the guys at Barbés Records knew that they definitely needed to step up their game if they wanted to enter the vinyl arena and drop some out-of-this-world unbelievable release. They smashed the little piggy bank and apparently spent all their savings in producing the most awesome double-LP ever!
Roots Of Chicha compiles the best songs of both volumes from these series and it comes in a gorgeous packaging that makes you wanna buy doubles just to frame a copy and hang it on your wall. It's done in some heavy-ass thick cardboard (the bones in my back are gonna hate me for adding this to my record carry-on case), with great quality pictures and it comes with a nice big 20-page full color booklet that makes it an indispensable collector's item. This is double amazing considering than in its time and in its homeland this music never received this kind of v.i.p. treatment. Like most other cumbia from the 60's and 70's, chicha albums never came with extras like that, the production values were considerably low (which from a perspective adds to the kitschness of their design) and the written information was always minimal (that, I assume, is because their main target audience at the time was barely literate). So, yeah, 40 years later, chicha finally gets the treatment it deserves with a top quality album like this.
I still love the art in the Vampi Soul's comp a tiny bit better, just because it's more cartoony. But The Roots Of Chicha in vinyl is set to break all other records and become a contestant for the best Latin music reissue collection ever released in vinyl. Plus, unlike the Vampi Soul's comp, this one has all the must-have classics. So if you're only planning to have just one chicha compilation on your collection, look no further, this is all you need.

Buy it directly from Barbés Records here.

DJ RAFF-Latino & Proud (Nacional Records, 2011)

2011-07-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

If you've been reading The Hard Data for a while you already know very well how much I admire this Chilean musician who goes by the name of DJ Raff. I have mentioned him countless times on this blog (my review of Raffolution was one of the first posts here), I've used his music in pretty much all my mixtapes and I openly begged Nacional Records, more than once, to release his music in the US and bring him here to perform.
Needless to say, I was extremely excited when I found out he was coming out with a brand new album, Collage Binario, with his recent experiments in sonic architecture, a minimalist, abstract opus that tangentially deviates from his scratch DJ origins. Even more excited I became when I heard rumors of Nacional Records finally signing him and releasing this album outside of Chile. And then I saw the title change...
(Here comes the bitching.)
You know it, you had it coming, Nacional. You know I love you guys and I support most of your releases. You guys really know your shit and I'm nobody, my opinion barely counts and my knowledge of music marketing is close to zero. But it really pisses me off when still, in this day and age, we need to pull the "Latino" card out to try to sell music that stands finely by itself and can compete on the same level with the top international artists of its genre without any need of niche induction.
Because that's exactly what's going on here. You have a great album, with some dope ass beats that anybody who follows the avant-guard of post-hip-hop production (Flying Lotus, Gonjasufi, Sa-Ra, for example) will undoubtedly enjoy. The album is almost all instrumental, lyrics and sampled vocals are just merely there to decorate the beat production where the focus is. And those beats have almost no evident references to Latin music. The artist does not identify himself as a Latin music artist, he might as well be French or Japanese. He just happens to be born in Chile, but that's just a side note in his resume. True, he once belonged to a hip-hop crew called La Pozze Latina, but that was in 1994 and since then I haven't seen him use the Latino card to introduce himself or his music ever again.
But you think Collage Binario (Binary Collage) is too sophisticated a title and/or rather pretentious and it will alienate the average US-based Latin consumer and record reviewers of Latin media will not pick it up. And you are right. But... do you need them? I mean, when they release a DJ Krush album in the US, are they aiming at the Japanese community as target market? When they release an Amon Tobin album are they targeting the Brazilian immigrant community? The answer is no. Then why bother trying to capture the attention of the Latino niche with a phony title if they are not gonna get it anyway because they're too behind to appreciate this kind of music?
Just look at the artsy cover, there're no calaveras or Virgen de Guadalupe or palm trees or low-riders or er... wrestling masks or any other Latin bullshit cliché and it perfectly represents the abstract sonic experimentation dominant in this album. You really think the type of Latinos who might be enticed by a title as Latino & Proud will pick up an album with that cover?
Latino & Proud was the title of a track included in DJ Raff's solo debut Raffolution, in 2008, and granted, it's a tight track. I still play it on my mixes and sets a lot, in fact I just played it last week at a gig. But when you take it out of Raffolution to include it in this release, it's more the exception than the rule amongst a collection of songs (some already released in the Traveling Partners series) that doesn't have any other reference to Latin culture, besides some words in Spanish here and there. So the people who'll pick up the album based on the title, because they like Latin stuff, will probably feel disappointed or even ripped off (or maybe, who knows, they'll end up expanding their music palette and learning about new music, but I doubt it).
Market segmentation in the US drives me nuts. I get really frustrated when I see this type of things happening. Like when fellow Chilean DJ/producer Bitman of the Bitman & Roban duo went solo and changed his name to Latin Bitman (probably also by suggestion of Nacional Records) or when my old friends Sindicato Argentino del Hip Hop had to resist pressure from Univeral Records trying to get them to change their name to Sindicato Latino del Hip Hop. Ridiculous.
Anyway, the whole labeling yourself as Latino and the minority pride associated with it only makes sense within the United States (where the vocal sample used for "Latino & Proud," the song, originated). Almost nobody in South America (specially not in Chile or Argentina) will go around claiming "I'm Latino" because it's an understatement. The same way you won't find an Italian or Finnish artist claiming "I'm European" while in their homeland. It's simply redundant.
That being said, if you still don't know DJ Raff (and again, if you've been following my blog you definitely know him by now) this is a great chance to catch up with one of the most interesting musicians coming out from the Southern half of this continent. Even though there're some tracks you might already have from previous releases, Latino & Proud has 80% of new never released material and if they ever press it on vinyl I'll make sure to buy not one but two copies of it because I love it. Regardless of the wacky title.

Please, ignore my rant and buy the album at any major digital vendor, including Itunes, Emusic, Amazon, etc. (CD available next month)

Read my interview with DJ Raff for Remezcla here, where I asked him about the album's title selection, among other interesting stuff.

STRONGHOLD SOUND-The Audio Refuge Compilation (Stronghold Sound, 2011)

2011-07-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

People wonder why I haven't been posting much lately and why I haven't yet released a new mixtape. Well, I was mainly busy working on this project right here, The Audio Refuge Compilation by a new Bay Area collective of artists and record label called Stronghold Sound.

The label's debut album dropped officially today and it's available at all your usual digital music vendors. It was entirely recorded and produced by my buddy Dub Snakkr at his studio in San Francisco and it involves the talents of plenty of other artists with roots all over the world that converge in this cosmopolitan city. We have people from Syria, Guinea, Morocco, Palestine, Colombia, Mexico and of course myself (and my friend Tami) from Argentina collaborating in these culture-bending, border-crossing sonic experiments.

For this compilation I decided to sign my work with my new collective moniker, Bondi Blaster, because I'm far from being the only creative force behind those tracks, which were all done in collaboration with several other people. Bondi is Argentine slang for bus and buses are arguably the main disseminators of cumbia music in Latin America, whenever you get on a public transportation bus in Buenos Aires, La Paz, Santiago or Mexico City, you'll most probably listen to the driver's own stereo blasting out the latest cumbias. But buses are also called colectivos (collective) in Argentina and other places, and I wanted to make it clear that those tracks are not DJ Juan Data productions but the result of a collective effort.

This is just the beginning. I'm currently working on Bondi Blaster's own release, to drop later this year, which will include new original tracks and many remexies of the ones included here (some done by international ñu-cumbia luminaries, I can't wait to tell you who!). At the same time, Stronghold Sound will also be releasing a lot more music from around the globe, including a double compilation of underground West-African artists that it's almost ready to drop, so make sure you follow us on facebook or whatever.

But that's the future. Right now, we have The Audio Refuge Compilation. A collection of 17 tracks representing different styles of music from reggae, to hip-hop, to dub, to cumbia, to a variety of traditional and innovative African and Middle Eastern styles. The digital release also includes as a bonus track a very special collaboration by Bay Area's underground hip-hop legend Gift Of Gab from the group Blackalicious.

<a href="http://strongholdsound.bandcamp.com/album/audio-refuge-compilation">Audio Refuge Compilation by Various Artist</a>

DIGGING: Cumbia 45's For Y'all

2011-07-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, after a two months long hiatus my favorite section of this blog is back, the section where I share with you, my followers, some of the odd finds I came through while digging for cumbia in my favorite format, 7 inch records. As usual, I try to provide the best quality accessible of rips and, unlike other lazy bloggers out there, I take the time to add the art and all the information available along with each file. Enjoy!

LOS CORRALEROS DE MAJAGUAL-"Mi Burrito/Merengue Bonito" (Discos Fuentes, date unknown): I don't think there's any other farm animal with more cumbia references than the donkey. How the fuck can people make so many fucking songs about donkeys without talking at any point about donkey cocks and bestiality (sorry, inter-species erotica!) I just don't really understand it. And we are not talking about the all in one Mexican wrapped lunch to go here either, it's the actual burro. I have at least ten other cumbia songs about donkeys by the likes of Riki Maravilla, Los Millonarios, Black Power, Grupo Ternura, Los Dinners, and yes, of course New York's Yerba Buena who scored a hit in 2005 with the single "El Burrito" (and that's just from doing a search on my Itunes, imagine if I went on google!). If that wasn't enough to prove that there's a trend here, Los Corraleros themselves had a previous hit with "La Burrita de Eliseo" penned by Lisandro Meza. I certainly do not understand the trans-national cumbia obsession with the donkey show, if it's just the results of cumbia coming from a rural background or there's some hidden double meaning that I don't get. Can anybody explain this to me?

LOS DESTELLOS-"Ronda Tropical/El Baile De La Coja" (Odeon, date unknown): I always wonder how these guys came up with the names of the songs, considering they're all guitar-driven instrumentals and don't really have a theme. Some, like "Ronda Tropical," are titles generic enough to suit pretty much any song, but "El Baile De la Coja" (the crippled girl's dance) probably has some hilarious anecdote behind the seemingly random title selection. Who knows? Anyway, two lesser known Destellos up-tempo tracks to drive all you chichadelicos crazy.

EMIR BOSCAN Y LOS TOMASINOS-"Soy Parrandero" (Top Hits 1977): I already gave you a vinyl rip by Emir Boscan last year, he's the Venezuelan guy who got really big in Mexico with some down-tempo cumbias like the memorable "Carmenza" where the basis for the Up, Bustle & Out's "Cumbion Mountain" rhythm came from. This time we have him doing "Soy Parrandero" a little more upbeat track with some misogynist un-PC lyrics of a guy who wants to drink and party and expects his wife to wait for him with the dinner ready at home. Only one track was ripped, the B side was a boring ass bolero.

GRUPO LOS PIRAS-"Yolanda" (Arriba Records, date unknown): Talking about Emir Boscan, remember the B-side of "Carmenza" was a song titled "Yolanda," well this is basically another version of that same song. The same one that Mexican Institute of Sound used for their opus maximum "Para No Vivir Desesperado." I don't know which version was used by M.I.S., probably neither. The thing is, the female name Yolanda is almost as popular amongst cumbia recurring titles as the donkeys. And this trend is equally strange, considering many different cumbias have been dedicated to women of such names in countries like Mexico, Argentina and Colombia, which leads me to think that Yolanda must be the most popular name amongst the female cumbia crowd, regardless of nationality. (Some examples of cumbia odes to different Yolandas come signed by La Integración, Roberto Torres & Su Charanga Vallenata, Orlando Fortich & Su Orquesta, and again, that's only from doing a search in my own hard drive).

ANIBAL VELAZQUEZ-"Alicia La Flaca" (Gema, date unknown): A prolific artist like accordion master Aníbal Velázquez is expected to have quite many flops along his immense succession of hits. In this case, the B-side was so horrible that I couldn't even finish listening to it. I just ripped the above mentioned track a super fast tempo accordion-driven guaracha that will cause carpal tunnel if you wanna play it along on the güiro. Anyway, a cool dance track to pack the dancefloor.

CESAR CASTRO-"Mucho He Sufrido/Yo Se Perder" (Discos Fuentes, date unknown): This guy came out of the lines of Los Corraleros De Majagual and the influence is evident. Accordion-driven cumbia/paseo/merengue with a distinguishable rural feel. Both sides are post-break-up songs that talk about being a loser, having suffered rejection and dumping and all that stuff. This is the type of music you play at the parties when you want people to go to the bar and order more drinks.

GRUPO MERCURIO-"El Velero" (Fonodiaz, 1992): I used to think that the cutting point for the production of cumbia 45s was 1991 but this one here proved me wrong, apparently in 1992, with the CD already completely established as the dominant music format, some people were still pressing 7'' vinyl with Latin music on them. However this particular one was released in the US, where as we know, the pressing of vinyl never completely ceased, unlike the southern part of the continent where vinyl pressing plants disappeared like the dinosaurs. It's funny because most of the cumbia available in this format (before the renaissance of the last couple of years) was from the '70s and '80s and it was produced with 100% live instrumentation, but in the '90s synths and keyboards became standard in commercial cumbia production and you almost never hear that on 45s, so this is a nice exception.

DOWNLOAD ALL HERE

PATAFUNK-Playa (Independent, 2011)

2011-06-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

There's a cumbia track on this album called "America Canta Cumbia." Its simple premise states that cumbia music is present everywhere "from Argentina to Canada" and as many others have claimed in the past, it's a sort of new musical lingua franca of the continent.
Everywhere you look nowadays there's new cumbia stuff coming out, sometimes from the most unexpected places (Venezuela, in this case) and it seems like every other artists that released an album after 2008 had to have a mandatory cumbia song in their tracklist.
Still, here in the United States, there's almost absolutely now mainstream representation of cumbia and I find that a bit odd. Spanish language radios play no cumbia, Billboard magazine has no cumbia top-10 in their popularity listings, the Latin Grammys have no category for best cumbia record or song (while, at the same time, they have like ten categories for Mexican regional music), etc. In other words, while cumbia is, by all accounts, the music that unites all Latino immigrants in the US regardless of their nationalities, it is still, apparently, an underground phenomenon: it doesn't have big stars and it doesn't sell records (or downloads). And/or, more importantly, the people who control the mainstream playlists (radio programmers, Billboard ranking compilers, record label execs) are completely out of touch with what's really going on. Also, there's still a lot of prejudice against cumbia amongst the upscale (or wannabe upscale) segment of the Latino market who still see it as working-class lowbrow music, music for "mojados" (recent/poor immigrants), even after the ñu-cumbia phenomenon of the last three or four years made gringo hipsters and highly regarded Anglo DJs embrace the genre; and on top of that is that fact that some nationalities (Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans) never really got into the cumbia thing, but that's a whole other issue.
Anyway, I'm not trying to come up with an anti-cumbia conspiracy theory here. These are just some random ideas that were bouncing around my head the other day when I was listening to Patafunk's Playa while riding my bike through Oakland. And those same ideas have been popping up in my head every time I listen to a new album by a non-cumbia artist who includes a mandatory one cumbia song (there're so many that I don't even wanna start listing them). Besides being from Venezuela, I don't know much about these Patafunk guys but I got their album the other day; overall it sounds pretty cool (in a sort of Bomba Estereo cool kind of way) and if it wasn't for the excessive presence of auto-tune, many more of their tracks would make it into my DJ sets.

Available on Itunes and probably other digital download stores.

DOCTOR STEREO-La Cumbia Perdida (Names You Can Trust, 2011)

2011-06-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

After surprising me last year with the best single of the year, and maybe the best single ever released since the rebirth of cumbia in vinyl, (I'm talking of course about Frente Cumbiero's Ananas Tornillo/Pitchito), I new that the good guys at NYCT wouldn't just stop there and would keep exploring the ñu-cumbia sounds with more great releases in beautiful 45's.
I was expecting with great anticipation the new Frente Cumbiero, but instead I got this one by the virtually unknown Doctor Stereo. First I was like huh? Who the fuck is this? I mean, I think I know pretty much everybody doing sample-based cumbia back in my home country, Argentina, and I've never heard of this Doc, by the way, is the Stereo part of his name a reference to Bomba or Soda? Or neither?
Then I realized that it was actually a new alias of a well known DJ/producer called Ezequiel Lodeiro, who you may remember from last year's must-have release El Latinazo on Love Monk 10'' single. He's also the host of a highly regarded soul music party back in my hometown.
"La Cumbia Perdida" is a nice little piece, based on the percussion-heavy Colombian cumbia of Discos Fuentes beginnings (think the breaks of Los Teen Agers, Pedro Laza, Climaco Sarmiento, Sonora Cordobesa, etc) so it pretty much falls into the same category of Frente Cumbiero's release, but with a much cleaner, as in less excessively over-layered production style. Very different from the average ñu-cumbia that's been coming out of Argentina since the Zizek boom.
I haven't played it in my sets yet, but I'm leaning more towards playing the remix on the b-side because it has the addition of some afro-beat guitar that makes it delightful.

Buy it here.

DA CRUZ-Sistema Subversiva (Six Degrees, 2011)

2011-05-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

My friends at Six Degrees Records have a thing for Brazilians living abroad (they are the ones who ten years ago introduced us to Bebel Gilberto and Zuco 103, remember?). Well, I happen to have a thing for Brazilians living abroad too. I'm not saying that I prefer them over Brazilians who stayed home (many of my very favorite artist were born and still live in that country) but as it usually happens, when artists migrate to other countries they gain a fresh perspective of their native culture and let go of many of the tacit inner restrictions of the local scenes, hence they are more likely to experiment with their roots and take them to a whole different level with very interesting results.
Mariana Da Cruz is a Brazilian singer who lives in Switzerland and there she hooked up with this producer called Ane H. and together they became Da Cruz. I haven't heard their previous work (although now I'm intrigued, so I'll probably end up downloading it soon) but this one here, I know I'll be playing it in my DJ sets for sure. It has some incredible funky beats. And I'm talking some dope ass futuristic funk here. Not the retro-funk of Paula Lima or Ed Motta, and not the booty-centric baile funk of Rio's favelas either. Although there're elements of both those styles.
My only issue with it, is that I can't tell if these tracks were aimed to the dancefloor or the lounge. You see, the tracks start with this hard hitting funky breaks and the synths push the groove forward and you are like ready to start dancing your ass off, and then she starts singing... Don't get me wrong, Mariana has a really nice and distinctive voice, I'm not criticizing her singing skills here. It's just that the melodies of her songs that are too mellow and her vocal style lacks the energy and edge to keep up with the up-tempo tracks. It's an odd mix. I still haven't tested Da Cruz on my sets but I will tomorrow at a Brazilian party (for Brazilians living abroad) that I'll be DJing at and then I'll see if they work as peak-of-the-night dancefloor tracks to go along with Salome de Bahía (another Euro-based Brazilian) or they should be restricted to the warm-up period. Either way, I will play them for sure.
Now with such amazing beats this album is begging for remixes and I know DJs and beat-producers will love to get their hands on this shit. So I'm looking forward for a potential Sistema Subversiva Remixes (on vinyl would be asking too much?), oh and I wouldn't mind if they released the instrumental tracks either. For those of you who don't care about DJing and just wanna listen to good music on your headphones, don't sleep on this one when it comes out next month.

WHISKEY BARONS-Nuggets#11 (BSTRD BOOTS. 2011)

2011-05-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

The Whiskey Barons have released a bunch of memorable reedits of Latin soul classics that are a must for every DJ who appreciates finely crafted soulful beats. In this occasion, however, they went for two obscure reggae covers of classic Jamaican tunes done by virtually unknown Latin American artists (not credited on the label).
Now, I'm not particularly a reggae lover, but I do like a lot of dub music and dancehall, and even some old timey ska and of course, I also like a lot of reggae en español.
There's plenty of good original reggae being produced in South America well more than enough to avoid the formula of the translated cover of the imported hits. In fact, that formula is pretty much outdated.
Back in the day, people in Latin America were doing a lot of covers of contemporary Anglo hits badly translated to Spanish and this happened in all genres, from early rock 'n' roll, to funk, disco and reggae. Eventually people started writing their own songs in those same styles, adding them a little of their local flavor and making the themes more relevant to their listeners and the translated cover that reigned supreme during the '60s and big part of the '70s started to be widely regarded as inevitably cheesy.
Nowadays, however, there's a whole new market for this old covers. There're some Latin DJ/diggers who rescue these forgotten gems and display them through the prism of ironic nostalgia and then there's some gringo diggers who mainly just see the novelty factor in these tracks. They like the fact that it's a familiar tune in a language they don't quite understand and it sounds slightly different than the original, almost like a sort of remix. I don't think they get how cheesy this translated versions are or how horribly bad are the translations, and they don't really care about that.
I wonder what would be the effect if this phenomenon happened the other way around. If, for example, you had Z-list American bands doing covers of Argentine cumbia villera top hits with the lyrics clumsily translated into English; would they get any sort of cred in their local scene? And more importantly, would people in Argentina laugh their asses off while rolling on the floor when they listen to it? I know I probably would, but I probably couldn't stop listening either...
Anyway, don't mind me, I'm rambling today. This 45 here has a re-edited cover of Desmond Dekker's "Shanty Town" (re-titled "Buena Suerte") and a twisted version Gregory Isaac's "Night Nurse" in primitive Spanglish. I'll probably be spinning the first one a lot more on my sets, since the slow tempo of the second one puts me to sleep. Still, even if it's just for the novelty factor, it's a record worth adding to your collection and it represents more good news for those who share with me this inexplicable fetish for Latin 7'' vinyl records.

101 THINGS TO DO IN BONGOLIA (Electric Cowbell, 2011)

2011-05-19T20:54:00.000-07:00

My wife once asked me, not long before we got married, how did I envisioned my professional future. You know how this is, no matter how much they say they love you, they don't wanna marry you if you're completely delusional in your bohemian aspirations and plan to make a living as a DJ for the rest of your life.
Anyway, I told her that in an ideal scenario, where the money issue was taken care of miraculously, my dream job would be to run a home-based record label that only presses music that I like, exclusively in 7'' vinyl.
Yeah, I know from the top of my head who'd be the first ten artist that I'd sign, all people that I personally admire, who made songs that I wish I was able to play in my vinyl sets if it was available in that format.
Pressing 7'' vinyl is a whole statement in itself. Like the 7 Inches blog wisely puts it "It's safe to assume if you're pressing 7" vinyl, you're not in it for the money." It's implied that you do it for the love of music. The money to be made in such a tiny market is insignificant in comparison to the investment risk. Plus, only a real music lover would prefer to listen to music in this uncomfortable format, that forces you to stay right next to the record player, or at least within a ten foot radius, because you have to change it or switch sides every four minutes, or less. Most people don't care about music that much, they just want something to play in the background, they would never just sit in front of an audio device and pay attention to a whole song, they don't dedicate the time to actually listening to music, they just want something to hear. Multi-CD changers first and MP3s later, changed those listening habits forever. Now music is something that's just there, in the background, we take it for granted, we get it for free, from the internet, and we let it play in shuffle mode.
So, playing 45's, besides being a hip anachronism it is, at least for me, a statement of how much you love and care about music. I have the feeling that this was the main motivation behind the New York-based label Electric Cowbell. They opened doors just over a year ago with an explicit motto: press exclusively 7'' vinyl of music they love, regardless of the genre. Amongst their impressive catalog, they released a couple of really good Latin 45's that I've reviewed in this blog and played on my sets and mixtapes.
The fact that the music was only available in that format, for me, was like the ultimate fuck you to the obsolete CD. Oh, you don't have a record player? I'm sorry, get one! Some are way cheaper than an Ipod and I bet you have one of those, right? You wanna really support the artists you love, buy their music in a format that cannot be bootlegged!
Anyway, the Electric Cowbell guys just released a compilation of their catalog's bests... in CD! I have to admit I was greatly disappointed at first. Like if they had just betrayed everything we were standing for. So what if you aunt can't listen to your music because she doesn't have a record player? Fuck your aunt!
But then I understood. The Electric Cowbell guys probably thought that that same ideal scenario that I was fantasizing about when my wife asked my about my future was a real place. That there's actually a parallel reality where running an only-vinyl record label is a viable, profitable enterprise. While the truth is that we, 7'' record enthusiasts, are a niche within a niche and that yes, we need to cater to your aunt too.
Oh well, talk about popping my bubble. Of course I had to tell my wife that my plan was going back to school and get a diploma of some sorts and find a decent job. And of course, Electric Cowbell now releases CD's too.
101 Things To Do In Bongolia includes, besides many of the Electric Cowbell tracks that I previously reviewed here some really good remixes and bonus tracks worth having. As usual, I'd recommend people to purchase the originals in vinyl. But I realize a lot of you fuckers, and aunts, don't give a shit about my beloved old-school format. So there you have it, you can buy the CD now, or the digital download, whatever fits your lazy-ass music listening habits the best.

TOY SELECTAH-Mexmachine (Mad Decent, 2011)

2011-05-16T17:59:00.000-07:00

I've been very impatiently waiting for this one to finally drop for two main reasons. One, my old friend Toy Selectah has apparently been touring a lot lately or keeping himself busy with other projects and not releasing too much. I miss the times when we'd get a new Toy/Sonidero Nacional remix every other week. What happened to the prolific producer that two years ago delivered The Mexmore collection of remixes on Mad Decent and a memorable vinyl EP on Bersa Discos pretty much back to back?
For the past year or so, the maximum patriarch of this global ñu-cumbia scene has been very quiet, keeping us guessing about his next move and then they finally announced he was coming up with an official Mad Decent release, (on vinyl!), and I was like I want it now! Like the time when I was like 9 and I first saw the Battle Cat action figure on the window of a toy store and I knew I had to have it because there was absolutely no way I could play with my Masters of the Universe figures ever again if I didn't add that amazing green and orange tiger to my collection.
Which leads us to the second reason behind my impatience, it's been like two months since they announced it, a digital bootleg of the album leaked to the blogsphere long time ago and the EP that supposedly was gonna drop on April 12th didn't ship out until a whole month later. And I was one of the dumb fucks who pre-ordered it! So it's been a whole month plus four days of checking the mail every single day with the illusion of getting a package from Mad Decent and finding nothing instead. It's like if my uncle bought me that Battle Cat figure that same day (which he did, thanks uncle!) but then my parents wouldn't let me open it until the night of my birthday (which they actually didn't do, but it would've been hella fucked up if they did, right?). How dare you Mad Decent fuckers play with the illusions of a kid like that? And you didn't even send me the fucking "free sticker with every order" that you announce on your site? What's up with that? Not that the sticker would make up for the delay, you should've sent some free records instead. Dude, just a couple of weeks ago I bought some records from some other label and there was a two weeks delay in their delivery... I've got a free t-shirt and a CD! And I'm not even one of those who will be expecting free shit just because I write about it, I don't mind paying for stuff I like, like this. But this got me really pissed off, you know? I'm glad Toy Selectah is the only artist in Mad Decent I care about and that he's been releasing new stuff so sporadically lately, because I'd hate it if I was forced to buy stuff from these cats more frequently.
Anyway, the album is great, go and buy it here now that they finally have it in stock.

EMPRESARIOS-Sabor Tropical Remixed Vol. 2 (Fort Knox Recordings, 2011)

2011-05-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

This type of shit always happens to me for doing such lousy job as a journalist and not properly reading the press releases I get. I just download the album, listen to it once, write a review with my first impressions and post it... and then I get in trouble. What did you expect? I mean, I do my serious research when I write articles for publications that pay me, but here I only do it for my own amusement, nobody pays me, they don't even thank me for my work, so I don't put too much thought into it. I mostly just improvise.
So, just yesterday I posted a review of Empresarios' Sabor Tropical Remixed and at the end of it I was wondering if there was going to be a volume two because that one was like missing all the good songs, or my favorites at least. And right away I've got a comment from someone at The Fort saying "yes, there's going to be a volume two you lazy fuck excuse for a critic, didn't you read the press release all the way through?" (I'm paraphrasing here so those might have not been the right words, but that's exactly how they echoed inside my head). Soon after that I've got another press release announcing the second volume and fulfilling all my requests!
Yes, the Nickodemus remix of "Cumbia" will be there, of course. But there're also many other gems that you can't afford to miss. There's two great remixes by DJ Sabo, one by Los Cosmico Bandidos (make a mental note to watch out for these guys) and the Kinky Electric Noise remix that we found out about through the comment of this blog months ago. There's more, but you see, I didn't have time to listen to it all (and once again I'm not doing my job right).
Well done Fort Knox, you double surprise me in just two days. Now it's just a matter of waiting patiently for the vinyl releases of these two beauties.

EMPRESARIOS-Sabor Tropical Remixed (Fort Knox Recordings, 2011)

2011-05-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

Just yesterday I was listening to an MP3 preview of this upcoming Fort Knox release when the mail man called me to the door. He had a big package that needed delivery confirmation: it was a box full of vinyl records from my favorite record label ever, Fort Knox Recordings!
It included, amongst other awesome stuff, the Sabor Tropical LP which I didn't even know was available on vinyl already and was one of my favorite albums of 2010 (even though it was officially released in 2011, I reviewed it here in December so it made it to last year's top 11).
Sabor Tropical Remixed will also get vinyl treatment apparently, but it's coming out first in digital format in a couple of weeks. It includes multiple remixed versions of a handful of the original tracks including a super funky remix of "Happy" by Telephunken and a great upgrade of "Space Selectah" by the Fort Knox Five themselves. Just for those two tracks, it's a record worth acquiring.
Unfortunately it does not include any remixes of my personal favorite, "Cumbia," which was already remixed by Nickodemus and as far as I know that mind-blowing version was only released digitally (I mixed it on my Barbarie megamix). I don't know, maybe the vinyl will have a different track listing than the digital release, but I think it's a sin releasing a collection of Empresarios remixes without even one version of what in my opinion is their best song. Or, who knows, maybe that number one on the cover means that there's going to be a number two later on, with remixes of the rest of the songs, including "Cumbia."

JOAQUIN "JOE" CLAUSELL: Hammock House, Africa Caribe (Fania, 2011)

2011-05-07T11:34:00.000-07:00

Whoever is that lucky motherfucker that recently bought Fania Records catalog is doing some very wise moves and has my total support. Pressing vinyl reissues of hard-to-find classics was probably their best decision but opening up the Fania secret vaults to allow today's top DJs and producers to remix some of that stuff, legally, for the first time, from the original tapes... man, that's like every DJ/digger's dream come true right there.
This new series of Fania releases called Hammock House goes beyond the basic remix and each one gives a DJ the opportunity to go through Fania's hidden gems and rework them into a mixtape of sorts, more like a conceptual long set. The first one was put together by Latin house legend Joaquin "Joe" Clausell and let me tell you, whoever has to mix the next one, will have an extremely hard act to follow.
Joaquin did a great selection of deep Afro-Latin jazzy soul, giving them respectful reedits and stretching out the percussion breaks and then mixed them together with some added live percussion arrangements on top. The house grooves are subtle and smooth and the salsa is almost completely absent, so I loved it.
Now the best part of this: the CD set comes with two discs, one with the aforementioned mix and another one with the "unmixed" tracks and that's where the real fun comes in, because you can play DJ and try to replicate the set with Clausell's reedits. Plus, remember when CD boxes used to come with carefully put together books filled with great photographs and complete liner notes? This one even included the story behind each selection written by the DJ himself. I know nobody buys CDs anymore, it's an obsolete format, but this one actually makes sense to own and even makes me wanna start collecting CDs again (but I'm putting all my hopes in Fania releasing the "unmixed" disc soon on vinyl, they must). Now if you're one of those who hasn't set foot on an actual record store in like a decade, well, it's not the ideal option, but you can go ahead and purchase the digital version here.

Digging, cumbia 45's for y'all!

2011-04-30T13:30:00.000-07:00

I'm back with more cumbia 45's to share. Haven't been very active lately with all the wedding and my parents visiting and all that but piles of new records have been growing around my desk and it was time to get some of these out of the way. There're some really good ones this time around, enjoy!

AFROSOUND-Sabor Jibaro/Calor (Discos Fuentes, 1976): "Calor" is one of those irresistible Afrosound classics in the style of "Caliventura," great beat, nice organ, almost no vocals, great dance track over all. "Sabor Jibaro" on the other hand has more of a salsa feel to it with all those arrangements, it's more down-tempo but you can still dance to it, it gets pretty good in some parts but nothing memorable, never as hot as "Calor".

LOS DESTELLOS-El Campesino/La Pastorcita (Líder, date unknown): A Peruvian chicha first for my selections of shared 45 rips. The record was pretty old and dirty and doesn't sound so great, but you can still enjoy that awesome psychedelic guitar working it on "El Campesino." Both songs are about poor farmers and their miserable life, are we supposed to dance or cry?

DOMINICA Y SU CONJUNTO-El Cucambe/La Manzana (Mary Lou Records, date unknown):I don't know anything about the artist here and I couldn't find anything online. It's pressed in the US, but the musicians could be from anywhere, who knows. Still, two great up-tempo tracks designed to ignite the dance floor.

DANDY BELTRAN-Cumbia Del Ecuador (Dan-Ed Records, date unknown): Another totally unknown. Maybe Dandy is from Ecuador, but I doubt it, the b-side is a boring ass bolero called "Cielo Argentino"(not included in the rips) and I don't think his Argentine either. Maybe the guy traveled through South America and dedicated one song to each country he visited. Still, this is the first cumbia I find that talks about Ecuador and it's pretty good. The record was pressed in Hollywood, CA.

HUGO BLANCO Y SU CONJUNTO-Oro Chocoano/Agua Fresca (Discos Fuentes, date unknown): Discos Fuentes in the '70s released a lot of stuff that wasn't necessarily cumbia like this oddball here. With its Spanish guitar, it sounds pretty much like an all-instrumental rumba, but then it has those weird phased drums... I don't know what the hell they were trying to do here. Anyway, the record is hella dirty and it sounds like a frying pan on high heat.

LIBERACION DE VIRGILIO CANALES-La Pantera Rosa (Sultana, 1977): My favorite from this batch. Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther Theme" reworked as a dope cumbia! I don't know who Virgilio Canales is and I've never heard of his band Liberación. I assume he's Mexican, because that's where the record was pressed, and that he mostly did covers, because the b-side (not included here) was a wacky Spanish version of Steve Wonder's "Sir Duke".

ROY RODRIGUEZ-Cumbia Cartagenera/Negra Cumbiambera (INS, date unknown): Some classic Colombian golden age cumbias by a lesser known name on a lesser known label but as good as the best Discos Fuentes from the time. "Cumbia Cartagenera" is a must have for any cumbia party and "Negra Cumbiambera" opens up with a sampleable clean break. What else do you want?

PASTOR LOPEZ Y SU COMBO-Traicionera/Mi Compadre Villanueva (Discos Fuentes, 1978): A Colombian by adoption, Pastor López is actually Venezuelan and it shows in his dance pop hit "Traicionera" in a style that influenced a lot of 80's tropical music. On the much more laid back b-side he tries to sound more traditionally Colombian.

DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE HERE

SERGENT GARCIA-Una Y Otra Vez (Cumbancha, 2011)

2011-04-22T18:08:00.000-07:00

So, I actually got married today. No kidding. We had the ceremony earlier today and now I'm just killing some time before we do some dinner thing with the two families, you know, nothing too fancy. Anyway, how is this relevant to the review you might wonder? You see, Sergent Garcia's concert at the Sterngrove Festival in San Francisco was the first show I went with who today became my wife. And yesterday I got a package with this CD as some sort of wedding gift, the first one, from my bosses at remezcla.com. So I've been listening to this CD today a lot. Didn't have time to come up with any thoughtful review or funny/potentially offensive remarks as usual, sorry to disappoint, you must understand my head is somewhere else. Still, the CD sounds pretty cool, it comes with the most amazing design in the booklet done by the ubiquitous Afro Mestiza from Colombia, who keep setting the aesthetics standards of mestizo music. The album includes guest appearances by Bomba Estéreo's Li Saumet and Tres Corona's Rocca, who back in the 90's was one of my favorite Spanish language MCs in the world, even though back then he sung mostly in French. Anyway, I don't know what else to say and my wife is waiting for me to get ready to go, so that's all the review you get this time.

ROMANOWSKI-The Instigator/Sol Cumbia (Bastard Jazz, 2011)

2011-04-15T00:47:00.000-07:00

As you all already know very well, I'll pretty much buy anything that has the word cumbia on it if it comes in a black circle made of vinyl with a big hole in the middle. So I didn't think it twice when I saw this one.
Romanowski has quite a big name as a DJ and artist here in the Bay Area but I haven't seen him anywhere close to the local ñu-cumbia scene. Granted, I don't know the dude and I don't know what he looks like so maybe he was right there all this time, peeping in silence from some dark corner at the Tormenta Tropical or El Superritmo parties.
Thing is, like DJ Zeph did last year, plenty other local (and not local) DJs and beatmakers from other scenes (from hip-hop to dubstep) have recently discovered cumbia thanks to all the ongoing blogging hoopla and decided to try their luck with everybody's "exotic" rhythm du jour.
Nothing wrong with that. I personally welcome them all, the more the merrier. I wasn't born into cumbia either so I could too be labeled a bandwagon rider. I really like the two tracks on this 45, and I'll probably play "The Instigator" a lot more in my eclectic sets because of its irresistible funky beat. But I doubt the "Sol Cumbia" track will ever make it into my cumbia sets, you see, it doesn't sound like a cumbia at all. It may have some cumbia tiny elements in the arrangements, but if you played this for a cumbia audience at a Sonidero party in Mexico or a bailanta in Argentina and claim it's a cumbia, they'd probably stone you to death. Have we reached the point when people start throwing the cumbia name just randomly in the titles of the songs/albums just to guarantee some sales as it happened with funk?

BERSA DISCOS #7-DJ Negro/El Nosotros (Bersa Discos, 2011)

2011-04-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since the previous Bersa release. This one has been unofficially announced a long time ago, I've heard about it from Oro11 and DJ Negro himself many times, but for several reasons its release has been delayed until now. So you can imagine my excitement when I opened the mailing box yesterday and found this twelve inches of shiny black beauty.
Above all, I really appreciate the work and love that the Bersa guys have been putting in their releases. I love the fact that they release exclusively vinyl and that they have given the opportunity to showcase their talent to many otherwise unknown foreign artists. Like these two right here.
El Nosotros, I have no fucking idea who he is. I read he's from Canada or something, but I've never heard about him. DJ Negro, on the other hand is like Argentina's neo-cumbia best kept secret (even though he's been on Bersa Discos more than once already). He's like everybody's favorite producer (and by everybody I mean Toy Selectah, Oro11 and myself) but he hasn't blown out to international recognition quite yet, just because he's not part of the Zizek elite. But while Zizek in its recent releases has been straying further away from its cumbia roots, Negro comes from deep down the local cumbia underground and he's not going anywhere else.
There's almost no cumbia in El Nosotros' side, outside from the predictable sample of La Sonora Dinamita's cheesy-ass classic on the first track. The rest all goes around the reggaetón beat, sped up but not enough to reach moombahton tempo.
Negro opens up with an oddball, a remix of "Por qué te vas" an old romantic song by Spanish singer-songwriter José Luís Perales that I absolutely abhor, I guess because it fashes me back to some dark repressed memories of my toddler years, when the original was popular. "Por qué te vas" was a huge hit in Latin American romantic radios in the '70s and it's been covered in cumbia form many times before, from Mexican cumbia sonidera to Argentine cumbia villera (it was also covered plenty in other formats, like this one version by indie-pop weirdos Los Super Elegantes). What I'm trying to say here is that it doesn't matter how many times they cover it, or even if the one doing so is the best cumbia producer in Argentina, the song still sucks ass so I most probably won't be including it in my DJ sets.
The ones I will be playing as soon as tonight are the other two, both authentic DJ Negro bangers. The last one, "Demencia" for some unexplained reason comes in rebajada version, which I guess works out great if you're doing a dub set but it turns into a great dancefloor killer if you switch it to 45rpm.
Well done Bersa, keep 'em coming!

Buy it here soon, there's only 300 copies available and I already have mine so 299.

Colombia 45 (Soundway Records, 2011)

2011-03-30T20:11:00.000-07:00

I was all torn up when I found out that The Pinker Tones had canceled their California tour due to the sickness of one of their members. I was really excited to see them live. I haven't seen them since their 2006 show in LAMC and that's because they never came to the Bay Area (with the exception of the time they came with the Warped Tour in '08 which I wasn't gonna go, of course). And I was even more excited since I was supposed to open for them. We even did a short but funny interview last week in anticipation to the show. Good times!
But then, today, I got the news of the cancellation and I was like what? Really? I wanted to cry, but that's when I checked the mail and I found this package and all of a sudden my smile came back and I completely forgot about those Spanish dudes.
I mean, just take a look at the beauty of the packaging, you don't even have to have a turntable to want this. It's three beautiful 7'' records packed in individual black sleeves and then into a cardboard larger sleeve with silkscreen printing and the records look like old school Discos Fuentes, but they are brand new and they sound great and I just wanna hang this on my wall. I should just buy a second copy to take to the DJ gigs.
Soundway has been reissuing classic Afro-Colombian cumbia (and beyond) for a while now and they had done a great job with their compilations, but now they are also releasing reissues in 45RPM and for a confessed fetishist of the format like myself, that's like a waking up from an erotic dream with a raging hard-on and finding out Rosario Dawson is laying down naked next to me.
This collection includes rare cuts, most of them instrumentals with major breaks, by Pedro Laza y sus Pelayeros, La Sonora Cordobesa and Banda 20 de Julio de Repelón. Considering how hard it's to find good classics Discos Fuentes 45's in this side of the world without having to sell the soul of your first born male to the devil to be able to afford them, this collection is a blessing and I'm really crossing my finger for more of these from the Soundway guys. I just wish more actual record stores around here carry this stuff, because shipping charges from the UK are a bitch.

DANAY SUAREZ-Polvo De La Humedad (Independent, 2011)

2011-03-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

Right off the bat I'm gonna tell you: stop reading this, go and buy this album now! Done? OK, this has to be the like best thing I've heard in a long, long time. Scratch the like, this IS the best.
Some of you may remember Cuban femcee Danay Suárez from last year's Gilles Peterson's comp Havana Cultura, where she was like the new, unknown, unsigned talent who really stood out.
She has a beautiful voice and she can rap as good as she can sing, she's got lyrics, she's got flow, she's got street cred (hello, she's Cuban!) and she's gorgeous. So, of course Mr. Peterson developed a crush on her and right after the comp, made her record an EP in an improvised jam session. Cool jazzy stuff.
But now she dropped her official debut, an album with an odd title and a weak cover but also with some of the best rap in Spanish tracks I've ever heard in my life. And you know I've heard a lot, A LOT, of Spanish rap.
Granted, I have a thing for female rappers, I openly admit it, everybody knows it, but this goes way beyond any fetish of mine. Danay's talent is superlative and undeniable. And on top of that she's young, this is just her debut; how many rappers you know who have such a strong, serious, coherent, mature, first album? Nas? Do I dare compare this album to Illmatic? Sure, why not? Guess what, like young Nas, she also doesn't rely on guest appearances, it's pretty much all hers. And she may not have Pete Rock, Large Professor and Primo on the beats, but whoever did the production for this (especially considering the production limitations inherent to the blocked island) has very little to envy from those.
I know it's still too fresh to make predictions and I've heard this album only once (I only downloaded it minutes ago--a true case of love at first hear) but I'm pretty sure that right here I have a strong contender for 2011's Best Album. Watch this video and try not to get goosebumps.

Available on Itunes or Amazon.

THE BINARY CUMBIA ORCHESTRA-Cuchifritos 1 (Chusma Records, 2011)

2011-03-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

Just a few years ago all the cumbia that was available on 7'' vinyl was pre-1991. After the closing down of pretty much all vinyl pressing plants in Latin America, cumbia DJs across the continent were really fast in adopting the CD and vinyl (7'' in particular) became obsolete. Who would've thought back then, or even five years ago, that the format would experience a sudden rebirth in the XXI century?
Now thanks to the interest in cumbia by European and US-based DJs (who have money to spend in records, unlike the Latin American DJ's who rely 99% of the times on piracy), we have indie record labels in places like New York, Oakland or Germany releasing singles in 45rpm all over again, and that, for a fetishist collector like myself, has been one of the most welcomed side-effects of the ñu-cumbia crossover phenomenon.
Just take this one for example. The Binary Cumbia Orchestra, from La Plata, Argentina, just dropped their debut single on Chusma, and it's announced as the first volume of a series titled Cuchifritos. I'm really crossing my fingers, hoping they keep their word and release more shit like this because this is so good I can't stop listening to it.
On one side we have "Bo D' Gh," I don't know what the fuck the name of the song means, and it's an abstract composition that could've easily been included on the ZZK comps. The b-side is a remix of a remix of a modern classic of Mexican cumbia. "La Inconformable," sometimes also known as "La Inconforme" or simply "Siempre La Misma Situación" (that's the title most likely to show up on file sharing) was a big hit in Mexico thanks to the Sonora Skandalo version. Here we have a TBCO remix of an earlier version of that song by Grupo G later re-remixed by Schlachthofbronx (it took me like a full minute to type that name).
The lyrics are about a guy taking this one girl out on a date and she takes forever to get ready because she never knows what to wear and her lack of decision power over all ultimately drives him crazy. What turned this otherwise silly song into a hit however was the intro with those trumpets that sound like car horns during a traffic jam. I have no idea who the original author is, as usual, but I'm really digging this remix right here and I can't wait to mix it in my next cumbia set. I'm predicting this will be one of the hottest tracks of 2011, at least for The Hard Data Awards.

Keep vinyl alive. Get it here.

DJ STILL LIFE-Try Otra Vez (Bstrd Boots, 2011)

2011-03-16T01:40:00.000-07:00

This is exactly the type of shit that makes me happy. Last year I wrote on Remezcla a review for DJ Still Life's cumbia tribute to Aaliyah when it came out for the anniversary of her death. It was distributed as a free download, like most bootleg MP3s out there and this song in particular became an instant hit, for me at least. That same night I played it at my weekly gig and since then I can't remember doing a single digital cumbia set without it.
It has a great beat to please the hardcore cumbia fans and it makes the mainstream gringos come out and join the dance craze because they recognize the vocals. So I usually play it during the first quarter of the night and it always gets a great response.
I liked it so much that I selected it as the best mash-up of 2010 on the annual Hard Data Awards. Unfortunately the track was only available on digital format so I couldn't play it when I did my all-vinyl nights. Well, guess what, somebody in Brooklyn just made my dream come true and released that very same song on a beautiful 7'' single. To make things even better, the b-side comes with the instrumental track and it's one of those instrumentals that you don't really appreciate how great it is until you actually listen to it without the vocals. I've just got it and in a few minutes playing around with Torq I put together this rough mash-up with an acapella by Control Machete. Check it out.

Do yourself a favor, buy this here.

Digging: Even more cumbia 45's for y'all!

2011-03-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

Here's another bunch of 45 rips I just did, specially to share with you my digging readers. Following the cumbia diaspora, this time away from Colombia and into Mexico and El Salvador, with plenty of classics and standards to play at your next quinceañera and maybe some rarities to sample and remix.

CONJUNTO AFRICA-La Cadenita/Lindo Veracruz (Peerless, 1979): I give eternal props to Conjunto Africa (even though they're Mexican, not African) because they are the authors of the classic masked-wrestling anthem "La Cumbia de los Luchadores." Here we have them doing a cover of a classic popularized by La Sonora Dinamita. "La Cadenita" is a Colombian "religious" cumbia (in their own definition) about a guy who loses a necklace with a Jesus Christ pendant. Now the poor guy is lamenting the lost of both the necklace and the girl, Carmen, who gave it to him. Needless to say, I hate religious cumbia because I hate religious everything, but this is a huge classic among old school cumbia fans and it even started some sort of a thematic sub-genre of lost and found religious paraphernalia.

LOS HERMANOS FLORES-La Medallita/El Carbón (Boni Discos, 1986): Remember that one guy who lost the necklace? Well, this cumbia is about a kid who said he found one while walking down the street. Coincidence? Not really, in this case the pendant has the Virgin Mary instead of Jesus. Another classic, this time covered by the biggest name in Salvadorean cumbia, or at least the only ones who managed to gain some international recognition. Last week, Chilean cumbia-punk icons Chico Trujillo performed here in San Francisco and did their version of this song and it was one of the wildest moments of the night. The b-side is another cover of a Colombian classic, "El Carbón" also known as "Leña para el Carbón" or "El Carbonero" depending on who you ask. I don't know who the original's from because these people were not very good at giving credit to the authors when they recorded versions.

LOS HERMANOS FLORES-La Medallita #2 (Boni Discos, date unknown): You thought the saga of the necklace was over? Think again! Apparently the Flores Bros did so good in El Salvador with their cover of "La Medallita" that, following the tradition of Hollywood studios, they soon came up with a sequel. This time around the alleged owner of the pendant tracked down the kid who found it and persuaded the kid's mother to give it back. Yes, this is like a The Lord of The Rings in telenovela version... only instead of the precious ring to rule them all it's a fucking piece of cheap metal shaped like a saint, or something. Can you believe people used to write songs about stupid shit like this and actually score hits? I wonder if there are more sequels, what if the guy after recovering his medallita lost it again on his way home when he picked up a hooker and took her to a motel room? What if he was mugged? I need to know. I'm hooked!

LOS HERMANOS FLORES-La Turista En Apulo (Boni Discos, 1984): Ok, just one more by the Salvadorean Flores Bros. This one is also about finding stuff, but nothing sacred in this case. The singer says last night he went out dancing and found a female tourist who, to the singer's amazement, wanted to dance cumbia with him. After a whole night of dancing the woman with the strange accent asked him to spend the night together and he came up to the sudden realization that he was going to marry her! Now if I'm correct, in 1984 El Salvador was deep into their long civil war, right? And El Salvador is not necessarily a hot tourism destination, particularly not for single female travelers looking for random sexual encounters, those go to Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, you know, Italy, definitely not El Salvador in the middle of a bloody guerrilla war. Hence I call bullshit on your story, Mr Flores! I wanna see some hard proof, the girl's panties, some Polaroids?

LUIS CARLOS MEYER/LUCHO BERMUDEZ-Cumbia Cienaguera (RCA, date unknown): This song right here is widely considered one of the main anthems of international cumbia. I'm not a historian in these matters, but according to Wikipedia, this was most probably the first cumbia ever, recorded by a Colombian artist in Mexico and kick-started, back in the '50s the cumbia diaspora throughout the Americas and later the world. There are probably hundreds of covers of this track, maybe the best known by those who entered the cumbia field in the last couple of years is Samim's "Heater." This one is part of a four song 7'' EP and even though the word cumbia is all prominent on the cover, only two of the songs could be actually labeled as such. I didn't include them all in the rips because the record had some scratches and too many pops.

CARMEN RIVERO-La Comezón (Discos Columbia, date unknown): Another pioneer of Mexican cumbia. Legend says that Mexicans were obsessed with Cuban music until this woman came out and started playing the cumbias she learned in Colombia, but to make them more accessible to the Mexican mainstream, her band played them with Cuban orchestra-style arrangements. This EP is probably from the 60's and includes two cumbias plus one chachacha and one guaracha, both Cuban genres. That's how cumbia started to permeate into Mexico, under the all-encompassing label of "tropical music." Even though it's her name on heading the band, there are two male singers in these tracks, one of those guys sings my personal favorite, "La Muerte" with it terrifying intro it's probably one of the earliest examples of another curious cumbia thematic sub-genre: the horror cumbia. More coming up soon.

DOWNLOAD HERE

CARTAGENA!-Curro Fuentes and The Big Band... (Soundway Records, 2011)

2011-03-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

Quantic keeps digging Colombia, and he seems to be sitting on top of an infinite uncharted pile of gold.
If there's someone in the world I envy right now that is Quantic. Living in Colombia while making well deserved Euros in the Northern Hemisphere is a good formula to get by, combine this with the proper knowledge, contacts and experience and that's it, you're the Pablo Escobar of music.
From an international perspective, Quantic is doing more for Colombian traditional music than any Colombian musician or music historian could've dreamt of doing. I mean, he's got the attention of the first world taste-makers, the DJ's and the beat diggers, who otherwise wouldn't probably be listening to this type of music.
Just a few months ago I was happy to find out the Quantic Presents Tropical Funk Experience on Nascente Records and while I was still exploring that one now I'm shocked to find yet another comp of reissues co-signed by the acclaimed British producer/digger: Cartagena!
Cartagena! Is a very peculiar comp of reissues because it focuses on the career of one artist, Curro Fuentes, youngest of the Discos Fuentes' dynasty. Curro did not transcend to popular notoriety as other cumbia big names did, but was influential in spreading this particular sound of big band cumbia where the accordion was replaced by brass arrangements emulating cuban music, particularly the descargas (jams). This is the style of cumbia that was later popularized (particularly in Mexico) by Discos Fuentes' flagship band La Sonora Dinamita, with a much cheesier, radio-friendly approach. But thanks to this compilation we can find the actual roots of that fusion of styles from several bands where Curro contributed.
Thanks to Soundway, this amazing music is also available on double LP vinyl. It's probably gonna cost me an arm and a leg, but if I see one around no doubt I'll get it.

GRC Bailables Vol. 2-Colombia/Puerto Rico (NYCT, 2011)

2011-03-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

Greenwood Rhythm Coalition (a.k.a. GRC) is rapidly turning into my new favorite band and Names You Can Turst into my favorite label. One of the reasons for this is that they keep printing 7'', like this beauty right here, the other is that they adapt to DJ needs a lot of great classic tunes that otherwise it'd be too hard to mix.
I had these MP3s already, they give them out for free on their website (presumably because they don't own the rights to any of these songs), but the very same day they vinyl version was out for sale I felt compelled to snatch a copy right away.
The record comes with tiny hole and minimum information on the label (presumably for the same reasons exposed above) but it's a release as dope as any of their "legit" ones. Side A is called Puerto Rico and it's a remix of José Mangual "Bomba a Puerto Rico;" on the flip side the label reads only Colombia and it's, of course, a cumbia: "La Botellita" by César Castro. I mentioned the second one already on my previous post because it has the exact same intro of "Suéltala pa' que se defienda" and probably many other cumbias, since as we all know, they all used to rip each others off.
GRC plays along the classic, adding some tight funky beats and then they even go into a dubbed-out break down in the third half, solving the problem that many original old-school cumbias share, of leaving very little room for the DJ's to work with. GRC versions, remixes or re-edits, whatever you wanna call 'em, bring out the best of the originals with respectful minimum adjustments making the songs DJ and dancefloor friendly.
Man, how I wish I had these guys jamming in my garage, I'd come down with every old-school cumbia record I have that's hard to play because the tempo is not constant or it has a very short intro or outro and no breaks and say, "hey guys, make me a DJ-friendly version of this one here" and I know it'll be tight and I'll be able to play it that same night experiencing no trouble at all.

Digging: More 45 rips for y'all

2011-02-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

This time around there's no real gems in this batch. Mostly mediocre crate-filling cumbias and some hilarious ones that could fall in the so-bad-that's-good category. Lot of them are from México, even if they are done by Colombian artists, they are done for the Mexican market. Not that I have a preference for these, but when digging for old records in California, most of what you're bound to find comes from our southern neighbor. I promise for my next batch I'll try to get more of the good stuff, in the meantime, have fun with these.

EDUARDO NUÑEZ-La Cumbia de los Animales (Raff Records, 1977): I have no idea what the fuck is this. I can't tell if it's a song for kids in kindergarten or he's being ironic and there is has some double-entendre hidden meaning, very well hidden. My guess is that the guy who wrote was probably legally mentally handicapped. He comes out singing about the reaction he gets from his farm animals when he sings cumbia to them. And then he starts enumerating animals, with animal noises in the background. Once he's done covering all the species in his ranch, he starts the whole song all over again. That's it. Man, Mexico has to be a fascinating country if they actually allow people to record manure like this. The b-side was a ranchera so I'll spare you all the pain and skip it.

CHALO CAMPOS-El Porro de Jaime/Ay Gavilán (Latin International, 1978): This is probably the best song of this batch. I'd love to know the story behind it, but I could not find anything about it online. I'd guess it's an ancestor of Mexican cumbia sonidera. It has no lyrics, which is a blessing, only a guy that comes in requesting a song with an annoying voice and then thanks the band at the end for playing it. And then that massive bass-line! There's plenty of sampling opportunities here. The b-side is another cumbia about animals! In this case about a hawk. Man that's almost a whole sub-genre!

LOS DINAMITEROS DE COLOMBIA-La Probadita/La Africanita (Guitarra Discos, Date Unknown): I think these guys were either a spin-off or a side-project of La Sonora Dinamita, they even shared a singer. And they play the exact same type of pop-radio-friendly songs with catchy choruses and silly lyrics and lots of brass arrangements (I believe in Colombia this style was called chucu-chucu, to differentiate it from the classic accordion-driven cumbias). "La Africanita" is kind of an answer-record-to-/rip-off-of the crossover merengue classic "El Africano" by Wilfrido Vargas which around that time was successfully covered as a cumbia by you know who, La Sonora Dinamita. The other song doesn't suck as much, even though the lyrics are about sucking things.

LA SONORA DINAMITA-El Corazón/Macumba (Dicesa/Fuentes, 1987): "He who has the biggest one, prove it!" starts saying this song, that I'll be compelled to sample and take it out of context in one of my sonic collages soon. Later she clarifies that she was talking about the heart, not the other vital organ. Such was the intellectual level of Mexico's favorite Colombian pop-cumbia import. They also made a bunch of lame covers, like this one here of "Macumba" a late disco tune popularized by the biggest Mexican kitsch diva of the '80s, Verónica Castro, which at the same time was a lame cover of a French pop song by Jean Pierre Mader, who probably was covering from someone else, who knows, there's too many versions.

GALIEO Y SU BANDA-La Suavecita/La Cortina (Dicesa/Fuentes, 1986): More chucu-chucu from Colombia's Discos Fuentes for export. It seems like during the 80's, once Fuentes' golden age was over and cumbia left the Colombian mainstream, they focused on producing this type of big-band cumbia that was very popular in Mexico and its neighbors (this was pressed in Guatemala), but not too much in South America. The formula is pretty much the same as La Sonora Dinamita, with songs averaging on 100 BPM, lots of percussion and brass arrangements and PG-13 lyrics. This one includes a song penned by the legendary Calixto Ochoa of Los Corraleros Del Majagual and it's not really too bad.

LOS DINNERS-Suéltala Pa' Que Se Defienda/El Borriquito (Discos Columbia, Date Unknown): Los Dinners must be a Mexican cover band or something, I have no idea. The main track is a good up-beat dance-floor-packing cumbia. The same tune (but with complete different lyrics) was recently sampled and remixed by NYCT's house band GRC and is being released in a 7'' under the title "Colombia". Expect the review soon. The b-side could also be confused with an "animals cumbia" but in reality the donkey here is a metaphor for bad student. It is a wack-ass cover of Peret's classic "El Borriquito" (you MUST watch that video!) a silly Spanish/gypsy rumba about learning the vowels that was quite a hit in it's time and not only among elementary school kids! (It was covered in English by Cuban Peter Fernández, included in last year's Cuban Funk Experience compilation). I wouldn't dare call this a cumbia, but that's how they labeled on the record. It has a clean drum break.

TONY CAMARGO-El Año Viejo/El Negrito del Batey (RCA, Date Unknown): "El año viejo" is traditionally played at all New Years Eve parties in countries like Colombia, Venezuela and apparently Mexico too. Honestly, me being from Argentina, I had never heard of this song until last Dec 31st, when I was DJing at a party and the promoter's associate who's Colombian requested it. This is not the original version, but the one that was popularized in Mexico. The B-side is labeled as merengue, but has nothing to do with what we understand by merengue nowadays and it's a very politically incorrect song where the guy pretty much comes out saying "I don't like working because I'm black. All I wanna do is dance merengue with a hot black woman." Both songs are crap but they come on red vinyl, so how could I resist?

LA SONORA DINAMITA-Te Pillé, Pilla/La Bamba (Dicesa/Fuentes, 1987): I hate "La Bamba" not only for being a horrible song with lyrics that make no sense, but also because of what symbolizes in the United States. It's like the one and only song in "Spanish" (if that actually qualifies as Spanish) that's in every karaoke binder in every bar across the Nation, because that's what the average gringo thinks Latin music is. Gross. In 1987 there was a revival of this early rock-n-roll song thanks to the movie of the same name and the Los Lobos version included in its soundtrack and of course, La Sonora Dinamita wasn't gonna let the opportunity to capitalize on the fad pass them by and made their cumbia cover of this too. They were not alone and at least their version was better than the one released by Afrosound that same year.

As usual, the ripping quality might not be the ideal, but the files are in 320bt MP3 format and with great presentation. Being myself a compulsive downloader of digital garbage, I appreciate it when the people who post take their time to actually make the files look nice, you know, by attaching the cover image to each song, imputing all the available information, etc. I even go the extra mile and give you the BPMs of the song. So, there, you're welcomed.

DOWNLOAD HERE

And if you're new here, don't forget to check previous posts for more bizarre 45 rips!

THE ECHOCENTRICS-Sunshadows (Ubiquity Records, 2011)

2011-02-23T11:05:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been so focused on my DJing that I unwillingly neglected a lot of amazing music on the more mellow, downtempo, trippy side, that is not dance-floor oriented. So I decided to change that.
Back in the early 2000's I was DJing a lot more lounges and I was deep into all the new bossa nova and electronic tango that was coming out at the time, along with the instrumental hip-hop that was big back then (Grandcentral, RJD2, etc) but since my playlist became cumbiacentric and I became a nightlife mercenary plying commercial tunes at big clubs, I kinda lost interest on the more delicate sounds of the slower side of the spectrum.
However, since I moved in with my fiancé I've been sort of rediscovering all that music because she enjoys listening to it as background while we do home chores together and stuff. She's a lot more into soul than I am, so every time I run into a record like this one here, I burn it for her to play it on the living-room stereo. Shafiq Hussein's last year's En' A-Free-Ka has been, hand down, the most played CD on that pile and even though I still love it, I've been trying to replace it by subtly introducing new CD's. I even made a soulful mixtape, Gloryholes, with the secret intention of getting one of my mixes on her rotation (and it worked, so I'm planning on another one).
The Echocentrics' Sunshadows will definitely be my next inclusion into this living-room listening girlfriend-approved pile. It's a new side project by Adrián Quesada (the talented Texan musician behind Grupo Fantasma, Brownout and Ocote Soul) and let me tell you, it's as beautiful as it's trippy. Downtempo funky beats, fuzzed out guitars and dubbed out bolero melodies, plus lyrics in Spanish, English and Portuguese provided by Argentine Natalia Clavier (who we know from her singing on her husband Federico Aubele's albums) and Brazilian Tita Lima. That sounds like a pretty good formula to me and I'm pretty sure my fiancé will play the shit out of this.

Listen/Download the first single here.

PS: Coming from Ubiquity Records, I'm really hoping for some vinyl release of this too!

SPIA 104/REPORTE ILEGAL-Mexico DF Archivo del País (Independent, 2010)

2011-02-20T16:13:00.000-08:00

Every rapper's wet-dream is to have his voice pressed on a vinyl record so a DJ can scratch with it. Especially in the age of bedroom-produced mixtapes and free downloads, this remains as some sort of milestone achievement in the career of an MC, anyone can get record a song and put it on an MP3 online, so releasing vinyl makes it seem like more "official."
In the case of Spanish language MC's, in particular those in Latin America, this is the ultimate pinnacle that has only been reached by the extremely limited few. Vinyl production in Latin America abruptly ceased in the early '90s--all the pressing plants closed. By the time of Latin American hip-hop's coming off age during the second half of that decade, there were no place left to press vinyl. The very few artists who were lucky enough to get vinyl treatment (Tiro De Gracia, Control Machete, Orishas) had them pressed abroad and only with the backing of a major record label. For independent rap artist of Latin America, vinyl has always been way too far out of their reach.
So, Latin American hip-hop DJ's weren't able to spin their own local artists in their sets, and this was arguably one of the factors that slowed down the development of the scene. Many DJ's were forced to leave vinyl behind and embrace CDJ's which became hugely popular once CD burners for personal computers became accessible. But for those loyal to the vinyl the frustration was monumental. They could just spin rap in English, from the US, and if they wanted rap in Spanish the only available was coming from Spain, not Latin America.
That's why a release like this one here is of such a historic relevance for the Mexican rap scene in particular and for the whole Latin American Spanish rap scene in general (I say Spanish, because unlike the rest of the continent, Brazil kept on pressing local rap vinyl way after the extinction of the format in the rest of the continent). Spia 104, a rapper from Mexico City, from the Reporte Ilegal crew, put this together all by himself, without record label help, and he dedicated the album to the whole Mexico rap scene, as a collective achievement, which totally is. On one side the record has a selection of Reporte Ilegal's classic tunes that cover pretty much their long career since 1998. But the real gold is when you flip the album around: a whole side of DJ tools with sound effects and vocals for scratch, in Spanish, provided by many different local MC's. Finally, Latin American turntablists will be able to scratch and do tricks with punchlines in their own language, using real vinyl!
I'm sure this will have a great reception in the Mexican scene and it will be remembered as a historic landmark. This is a very limited edition, of course, so if you happen to see a copy of this around, don't hesitate to pick it up.

GECKO TURNER-Truly (Lovemonk, 2010)

2011-02-15T16:17:00.000-08:00

I had a hard time liking Gecko Turner's latest album, Gone Down South. Unlike his previous two albums, Guapapasea and Chandalismo Ilustrado which were love at first listen, this one is a lot less accessible, and it has virtually no dance-floor appeal. I still have songs from Guapapasea and and his remixes collection, Manipulado, under the must-play category of my DJ sets, but I doubt any of his recent work will make it there.
That's why I had my serious doubts when purchasing this 7''. But as you all by now should know I have a fetish for this format and I'll support with my hard-earned cash the few still-standing record labels that put Latin (but cool) music out in it.
"Truly" is the first single of Gone Down South and it's a classic '60s soul song, in English, with no Latin or Afro-Latin or Afro-Brazilian influences at all. So I'm missing all my favorite side from Gecko, and I'm honestly not too much into classic soul, but still, it's a pretty decent tune. Now the B-side is a remix by Moonstarr with a tight funky back beat bringing up the dance potential of the track, for a moment it even gets all Brazilianized with a samba loop too, and then closes with a clean break beat. So that one has way more chances of entering my DJ playlist (if I ever record a new Gloryholes mix, it'll definitely be there, that's for sure). However, I would've preferred if other track was chosen for the single release because I'm not a big fan of Spaniards singing in English.

RAEL DA RIMA-MP3 (Trama, 2011)

2011-02-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

Just look at the kick-ass cover art of this album, you know it's gonna be good, right? Sometimes I feel that Brazilians just dwell in another level. Like, they have it all figured out, while we are still looking for shit.
I've said it many times, I love Brazilian music, and Trama puts out some of the best modern Brazilian music out there. And while everybody else in Latin America is trying to come up with a way to sell albums in a market that's 99.9% dominated by piracy, these guys from Trama are releasing full digital albums (not just "mixtapes") in great quality, with amazing artwork that anybody can download for free. Somehow they found a way to cover the costs with advertising. Good for them!
MP3 might refer to the format in which the album is released, but it also an ingenious portuguese abbreviation for Popular Music of the Third World. Rael Da Rima was a well known MC in an underground rap group in São Paulo, Brazil, and he basically decided to step out from the rigid hip-hop restrictions, form a band and do an album where reggae is the main component. Yes, he pulled a Wyclef. There's also some other elements, including Afro-Brazilian music and of course rap, but instrumental roots-reggae is the main dish here. From a DJ point of view, I don't know if I'd be playing this at my Brazilian music sets too much, because it's mostly mellow (there's a decent bonus track remix though) and it's definitely not dance-floor oriented. I would've been happier with at least one up-beat dancehall track. But still, it's a great album to listen to and enjoy and, best of all, it's free (if you can figure out how to subscribe to Trama's website and download it--instructions are in portuguese).

GLORY HOLES-DJ Juan Data's 7'' Fetish (Free Mix)

2011-02-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD (right click)

I was thinking that I talk way too much about my love for 7'' singles on this blog and yet all my released mixtapes have been digital collages of MP3s. I love the digital format for its infinite possibilities, there's way more music available (and it's a lot easier and cheaper to find) and way more effects, filters and techniques to make transitions more rich and complex. I always tried to take digital mixing to the limits by doing stuff that would be physically impossible to reproduce in the real world, like mashing up bits and pieces from four or more tracks at the same time and shit like that.

But in the last couple of years, simultaneously with the expansion of my digital experimentation, I've recovered my original love for the vinyl format and for the 45RPM singles in particular. Many of the fruits of my obsessive collecting had been shared with the readers of this blog. In the last few months I've been more and more inclined to take out my racks of records to the gigs and leave the laptop at home and even though my skills with vinyl mixing are extremely limited, I enjoy the sound and the physicality of the format a lot more than the MP3. There's something magical about it that you have to experience yourself, I can't really explain it in words.

So, I felt it was due time to release a mixtape produced entirely with vinyl and to make things a little (or actually a lot) more complicated, I decided it had to be only 7'' vinyl, my personal favorite.

Now I know many of you are not necessarily vinyl collectors and only listen to music in digital format like pretty much everybody else nowadays, so you probably don't know how difficult is to run into decent music published in this format, let alone Latin (but cool) music.

I'd say that nowadays maybe less than 1% of all Latin music released to the market internationally is pressed in vinyl (keep in mind there're virtually no running vinyl pressing plants in Latin America) and most of that 1% (many of which are reissues and compilations released in Europe and the US) is pressed in the standard LP format of 12''.

The 7'' single was still quite common in Latin music up until the late '80s sometimes even early '90s in some places and then it suddenly disappeared completely. In the Anglophonic world the format remained alive beyond the '90s in genres like reggae, punk and indie rock but nothing like that happened with Latin music.

So, if you wanna collect Latin (but cool) music in 7'' format you either have to dig into the old dusty piles of mostly '70s and '80s stuff that managed to survive the vinyl extinction or the few that are released nowadays thanks to the current -but still tiny- phenomenon of reemergence of the format.

I'm gonna take the opportunity to thank all the record labels that still believe in this beautiful format and are putting out new amazing music, Electric Cowbell, Alala Records, Names You Can Trust, Discos Unicornio, etc. without whom this mixtape would've been impossible to conceive.

And for all of you who like my intricate post-modern sonic collages better, do not despair, there's more coming soon.

DJ AFRO TALKS CUMBIA AND MORE

2011-02-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

I just did a phone interview with DJ Afro, mostly to help promote Los Amigos Invisibles tour, for a local newspaper I write for. But obviously I was a lot more interested in chatting with the Venezuelan guitarist and DJ about his new solo album, Free, and his approach to cumbia. So this is the second half of that interview, translated to English.

- Free is a very different album from your previous Will Work For Fun, which was mostly focused on Latin house remixes.
- That one wasn’t really an album but just a collection of remixes I had been doing for a while for different people. One day I put them all together and showed them to a friend a he told me “you should release it!” And so we did. But it wasn’t conceived as an album. This new one is completely different. We were done with the recording of (Los Amigos Invisibles latest official LP) Commercial, which was done mostly in my own studio and I was on a roll, I didn’t wanna stop recording, I still had my head full of ideas so I kept going. Commercial had this rigid rules that we set out ourselves about doing pop songs, Free is the total opposite. No rules at all. Whatever I wanted to do, I did.
- That’s why there’s such a variety of rhythms and styles.
- Yes, it’s a little schizophrenic in some sense. But at the same time is the stuff that I listen to. The concept behind is was not to have a concept at all, do whatever comes up.
- Of course the track that stood out for me was the cumbia, “Rata.” What’s the story behind it?
- Actually, I fell in love with cumbia when we went to Perú (in 2008) and I discovered chicha. I went crazy for chicha. It killed me. I drove me mad. The guitar, the wah-wah, all that psychedelic thing. And this was at the same time of this cumbia revival and cumbia basically is—I’d argue that cumbia is the only rhythm that’s danced throughout all Latin America. You have cumbia from Mexico to Argentina.
- Funny that you said that because in that song I noticed references to both Mexican and Argentine cumbia, am I right?
- Absolutely.
- And on top of that you had a Venezuelan singer. Quite a statement of cumbia’s internationalism.
- Exactly. That guy, Gianko is a whole character. He’s a comidian/musician known in Venezuela for doing cumbia versions of rock song, like Lenny Kravitz. I met him and I said to him, “we gotta do something together.” It was amazing.
- What do you think about the whole new cumbia phenomenon and its appropriation by DJ culture?
- It was just a matter of time for it to happen. Cumbia is has a very trippy element in its beat and at the same time it’s very sexual because of the tempo. I think that everything that Zizek and what Toy (Selectah) is doing for cumbia is—It was a matter of time for it to explode. Two or three years ago I discovered chicha and I was telling people that cumbia was eventually going to overthrow reggaetón’s supremacy and they laughed. Look at where it is now.
-  So, can we expect to hear some cumbia in Los Amigos Invisibles future repertoire?
-  We’ve done it already! We did a cumbia for a Mexican wrestling video game last year called “Los Luchadores.” It’s a Mexican cumbia classic.
-  No way! You recorded a cover of Conjunto Africa’s “Los Luchadores”?
-  Yeah, that same one. You can actually download it for free from my website.

- Oh man! I love that song, I actually used it as an intro for one of my mixtapes. (Linyerismo Episode II)

- Oh, and we just recorded another cumbia for a compilation, it’s a cumbia version of an old Amigos’ song from our first album.
- One thing I always loved about Los Amigos Invisibles shows was when you guys do live mash-ups and mix riffs of popular songs with your own. I always had the theory that that had to come from a DJ brain, hence it had to be you.
- And you’re right. It’s a lot of fun doing that. We throw many obvious references that everybody will get, like I don’t know, Boys II Men or (2 Unlimited’s) “Get Ready For This” but what I like the most is to mix in a little more obscure stuff that not everybody will get, but some will.
- You made my day last time you came to town and mixed in the intro of Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody” with one of your songs, I don’t remember which one. Anyway, I know that you have recently picked up DJing again.
- Yes, it’s because of living in New York, it inspires me a lot. I felt the need for it. To be in New York and not do that would be foolish. It also has to do with the fact that after many years playing vinyl I finally made the transition to digital, so going out to play is a lot less painfull. Before, each time I went out to play I had to spend an hour and a half sorting through the records. It was a very amusing process, but still, now I became fond of the laptop.
- But you still have a vinyl fetish?
- Of course! That sound has no comparisson. Vinyl can’t be replaced.
- Well, then you gotta insist that Nacional Records releases more vinyl including both Los Amigos Invisibles and DJ Afro.
- I will, don’t worry.

FANTASMA-Fantasma City (Fire Ant Records, 2011)

2011-02-02T01:49:00.000-08:00

About a year and a half ago I wrote a pseudo-review of Fantasma's album Ciudad Fantasma, demanding for the rest of the album that, at that point, was only available in Argentina. Back then I claimed that if it was released for the international market in digital format I'd be more than happy to purchase a legal copy of it because I simply love these guys.
Well, guess what? After all this time, Fantasma City is finally being officially released outside Argentina in CD/digital download format on the 28th of this month.
So, first of all, I'd like to thank the efforts of the record label who's believing in them and putting this awesome album out. And I'd also like to thank them for quoting me and my blog on their press release!
The thing is, between that review I wrote in July 2009 and today, a long ass time has gone by and during that period most of the tracks included in this album either leaked onto the Internet or were included in other releases. So, even though I'm happy they're getting proper release treatment, I'm disappointed that there's no new songs from one of my very favorite ñu-cumbia artists in this release. Except two, I already had them all! Two of them were given away for free through this blog back then. Four of them were on the Cabeza Netlabel release of last year. One of them was in Sonido Martines compilation for Soot, another was in the first ZZK sound comp.
In other words, if you were, like I am, already a fan of Fantasma (not to be confused with Texas' Grupo Fantasma), you probably have all or most of these tracks already (maybe not in CD quality though). Hopefully then, this new release will somehow reach everybody else, all those potential new fans who still haven't discovered the greatness of this band and that will lead to many more future Fantasma official releases for the international market.

DJ AFRO-Free (Nacional Records, 2011)

2011-02-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

Remember when I reviewed Los Amigos Invisibles' Commercial and I said that I had a love/hate relationship with them because I loved their funky witty DJ-oriented side but I hated their horny-frat-boy pop-songs?
Well, apparently my prayers were heard by someone and Los Amigos Invisibles' front guitar and main composer, DJ Afro, is releasing a solo album with all the stuff I like about them (which invariably comes from him) and none of the cheesy sing-along post-pubescent party-anthems that make everybody dance and bring all the hot girls to their concerts but somehow annoys me.
A few years ago Afro released a collection of house remixes (Will Work For Fun) that includes many great tracks that are still mandatory on my Latin house sets and will probably remain there for a long time. My only issue with that album was that all the tracks where almost exactly 126 BPM, which I guess is great if you wanna play the whole album back-to-back as a mixtape, but if you wanna mix it in with other stuff, it'd help to have a little more variety of tempos.
That problem is solved in Free, the new release by DJ Afro, coming out in digital format today, but on CD in a couple of months (no announcements about possible vinyl, but it'd be great too). Unlike Will Work For Fun that was mainly remixes and versions and collaboration with other artists, Free is mostly all new original stuff. There's plenty of loungy Latin house, of course, but there's also other genres, including... CUMBIA! Yes, DJ Afro joined the bandwagon of the ñu-cumbia revolution and I applaud it and welcome it.
It's great because, coming from him, I would've expected a more housey approach to cumbia, but instead he went down to cumbia's traditional tempo and mixed up influences and clichés from Mexico's sonidera and Argentina's villera resulting in something refreshingly new in the hands of a Venezuelan.
Los Amigos Invisibles, as far as I know, experimented with pretty much every Latin music genre that was available out there except for cumbia (cumbia was not particularly popular in Venezuela during the past three decades [it was for a little bit before that, but then it faded away] where merengue and salsa romántica ruled the mainstream airwaves at the same time cumbia was spreading out throughout the rest of the continent). So hearing a cumbia from one of Amigos's members really made my day today.

DJ DACEL-Sol De Octubre (Potoco Discos, 2010)

2011-01-27T10:21:00.000-08:00

I was waiting for this one for a while, since I first saw that amazing promotional video they posted on youtube last year. I finally got my hands on it yesterday and I have to admit, I was a little disappointed.
Not that the album is bad, at all, it's actually great. As I've said before, Chile has delivered some of the best quality hip-hop to ever come out of Latin America and DJ Dacel is really at the top of the game. Fortunately, thanks to Ana Tijoux international breakthrough last year, many of you abroad are finally catching up with the Chilean hip-hop goodness. As for myself, I've been a fan of Dacel (who contributed scratches to Tijoux's tracks on many occasions) and his artsy rap crew, FDA for a decade now and when I heard about his first solo project coming out, I was expecting something else.
You know, hip-hop DJ/producers are usually restricted by the rap-song rigid format when making their beats: eight bars intro, sixteen bars verse, eight bars hook, scratch a little bit in between, etc. So, when a DJ is finally able to break away from that formula and make their own shit the way they like, that's when often the best stuff comes out. I hate it when DJ's finally release an album on their own and all it is is a who-is-who of his rapper friends featuring over said DJ's beats. Even if the beats are dope. That's just a rap album. I want a DJ/producer album!
Knowing Dacel as a huge fan of J Dilla (he even hosts a Dilla tribute party) and his school of beat production, I was hoping for something more abstract, in the lines of Dilla's masterwork Donuts, maybe some madlibian experiments with the MPC, you know, that type of shit. I know he is capable of something like that and the Chilean hip-hop scene is advance enough to welcome it. Plus he would get way more international exposure if he focused more on the beats and move the rappers to the sidelines. Look at where DJ Raff is now after Raffolution and the two Traveling Partners digital EPs.
That being said, if you like tight beat production made of 100% pure vinyl samples, and you don't mind people talking over them, you should definitely try to get a copy of this. Unfortunately, so far, it's only available legally in Chile.

DJ DACEL CON CAMILEASY Y SOLO DI MEDINA "VIVIENDO DE RECREO" from Aldo Guerrero T. on Vimeo.

MR PAUER-Soundtrack (Independent, 2011)

2011-01-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

There's one US city that has historically and systematically affected negatively the overall image of Latin music, turning it into synonym of cheesy, commercial and utterly uncool. That's, of course, Miami, Fl.
Known worldwide for its shallow and image-obcessed dance scene, Miami has given the world some of the most annoying summer hits to ever pollute the airwaves with the Latin label attached to them. I'd even go as far as saying that it's thanks to Miami and its pop artists (from the Estefan assembly line to Pitbull and his clones) that Latin music is almost never taken seriously by the mainstream Anglo world (just look at the Grammy nominations for the Latin music category on any given year!).
That being said, every once in a full moon, I receive an album from a Miami-based artist that defies all my preconceptions and surprises me with its freshness, leaving me with the hope that, somewhere in that city there must be an interesting underground scene that counteracts the generic bad taste dominant in the peninsula.
Mr. Pauer is a good example of this. I found out about him last year through Locos Por Juana's Evolución, where he provided the best remix. Now he's releasing his debut album, Soundtrack, with seven freshly squeezed tracks of pure Floridan electropical, not from concentrate. In one of them, Locos Por Juana's frontman Itagui returns the favor by delivering some vocals and the result is the first song of 2011 that I actually liked!
Release date for Soundtrack is Feb 15th. Check on Mr Pauer's website for more info.

Digging: More 45 rips for y'all!

2011-01-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

Since, apparently, nobody is releasing new music in 2011 and I'm eager to write, well, I'm gonna do something I should've done a while ago, write about old music. Yes, once again, here's a collection of vinyl rips done by yours truly, generously made accessible to you all in MP3 format, all of them from 7'' records I've been finding in the last few months.

EMIR BOSCAN Y LOS TOMASINOS-Yolanda/Carmenza (Top Hits, 1976): I'd never heard of this guy before but from what I found online he's Venezuelan and was particularly famous during his time in Mexico. This last bit I'm just inferring, because this record has been widely sampled by ñu-cumbia artists from that country. The actual songs are not really remarkable (they mix cumbia with Spanish-style singing, too weird), but you'll recognize the samples right away. "Carmenza"'s opening break was the foundation of Up, Bustle & Out's "Cumbión Mountain" sampled by Chico Sonido and that right there is one os the most important tracks in cumbia's new school, period. On the B side you find "Yolanda" which was sampled by M.I.S. on his memorable "Para No Vivir Desesperado." As a side note, the name Yolanda was apparently very popular in the cumbia circles, I have at least four different songs from the 70's and 80's titled after women with that name! Is that where the Yolanda Be Cool guys got their name from?

AFROSOUND-Nadie Sabe De Mis Penas (Discos Fuentes, 1991): Afrosound is like every Cumbia connoisseur's favorite group, but this one single in particular came out way past their prime. I didn't even know they were still pressing 7'' vinyl in 1991... and in Latin America! Anyway, there's one instrumental song in here with a Peruvian chicha style guitar and some cheesy drum machine beat. It's not very good but it has a clean bass line loop ready for sampling in the intro and a breakdown with dubbed out vocals in the middle that's pretty sweet. The b-side however was so wack that I didn't even bothered ripping it, it's a synth-lambada with kids singing about how the poor kids in Cuba wanna leave the island but Fidel doesn't allow them. What the fuck?!

LA SONORA DINAMITA-El Apretón/Canto, Amor y Pena (Discos Fuentes, 1983): I don't like La Sonora Dinamita. Even though they are Colombian in origin, they represent the status-quo of über-commercial cumbia in Mexico, the country where they're the most popular. I only discovered them after moving to the US and DJing at Latin parties with a Mexican-immigrant majority and they'd come up and request their songs. First I used to reject them, but eventually I ended up giving up and including a few of them in my sets. I still don't like them (too much focus on brass instruments make them sound like salsa) but I have to give it to them for always releasing good dance-floor packing tunes like these two.

ANIBAL VELAZQUEZ-Gloria/Cumbia De Los Aires (AMS Records, Date Unknown): If you like accordion cumbia, you can never go wrong with this guy! He has recorded some of the most amazing gems of the genre and if you're smart you have already picked up a copy of that Mambo Loco compilation that Analog Africa released last year. These are two dope uptempo tracks irresistible to any cumbia dancer. I know for sure both will stay in constant rotation on my DJ sets for a long time.

LOS TRAFICANTES DE ACAPULCO-La Cumbiambera/María (Cintas Acuario, Date Unknown): Whenever I'm digging for old Latin music vinyl, I always follow this golden rule: unless it's Los Corraleros de Majagual, NEVER waste my money on music by any group with a name like "Los (something) De (somewhere)", especially if they're from Mexico. That's a recipe for disaster. Even if they have the word cumbia on the label, most probably they're not a cumbia band but a ranchera/regional/
norteño/banda/whatever-crap band playing a cumbia; and since those mustached dudes suffer from a collective absolute lack of rhythm, any time they wanna do a cumbia, the results are nothing short from horrible. This one here sounds like it was sung by a 12 year old boy, but the nonsense lyrics suggest it's probably a girl. Anyway, I didn't bother ripping the other side because it's a ranchera. Why did I break my golden rule in this case you might ask? Let's just say amid the confusion of digging the record accidentally slipped into my bag and wasn't really "paid."

LISANDRO MEZA-Me voy para la luna/El Soldado (FM, 1982): Another of the all time Colombian cumbia hall of famers, who many worldwide know for his epic cover of Fela Kuti's "Shacalao" and some might remember as the original interpreter of "La Baracunatana," a song that later became a rock en español classic in the hands of Aterciopelados. This one however is not his most relevant recording. The A side is a decent cumbia with a funny lyric about going to the moon where "there will be no gringos acting like the rulers of the globe." The B side is a boring ass slow jam about a soldier who came back after fighting the guerrillas in the jungle and found his mother sick.

LOS CORRALEROS DE MAJAGUAL-La Gustadera/Mi Sombrero Viejo (Discos Fuentes, Date Unknown): Another favorite from Discos Fuentes. Along with Afrosound, Los Corraleros are the best group that came from that legendary label during its golden age. Especially when they had Calixto Ochoa as a singer. These are two very up-tempo dance tracks, so fast that they don't fall under the cumbia category and are labeled as charanga and paseaito, respectively. Still, whatever you call it, for the untrained ear it all sounds like cumbia but faster. If somebody wants to jump in and explain the differences between all those Colombian cumbia subgenres, please feel invited to do so.

LOS HERMANOS MARTINEZ DE ALLENDE-La Ardilla/Carterita de Nylon (Discos Dominante, Date Unknown): Once again I have to admit my complete ignorance about this one here. My assumption is that it's a Tex-Mex group, but they could be just Mexican too. I picked it up for a dollar in a box full of random crap and although I was afraid it could be one of those Mexican rancheros doing horrible cumbias, what made me decide to get it was the inclusion of the song "La Ardillita" (in this case wrongly named "La Ardilla") a Peruvian chicha classic by Enrique Delgado and his group Los Destellos (included in Vampi Soul's Cumbia Beat compilation). Of course it's not better than the original, but it's an ok version worth having.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Three Years Hard!

2011-01-08T03:16:00.000-08:00

Happy new year to y'all and happy third anniversary to The Hard Data! 2010 was a year of significant growth for this blog, doubling up the average daily hits from the year prior and gaining a lot more recognition and yeah, hate mail. I'd like to personally thank you all, followers, casual readers and haters, for making this possible. But let's cut it out with the stupid formalities.
It's been three years of irreverent, sarcastic and ultimately honest commentary on Latin music, something I always thought the specialized media here in the US was missing big time. But not any more.
Let's do some history. I remember back in 2001 when I first moved to the US to join the team of La Banda Elástica music magazine, I was shocked about the almost absolute absence of first-person commentary, honest reviews, combative editorials, etc. And it wasn't just in that particular magazine, it was the same in all other media that covered Latin music and culture in general (and Latin alternative in particular). There was like a universal tacit agreement within "the industry," something like nobody should talk shit about anybody else out in the open (only behind closed doors or behind their backs, of course) because we are a small niche and we all need to help each other to make it grow.
I was of the opposite opinion, I thought there was way too much garbage produced and sold under the Latin label and the fact that nobody was pointing it out and labeling it as what it really was, was counterproductive to our main common goal. Nobody is going to really pay attention to the newest, most innovative, most cutting-edge Latin (but cool) music if they aren't able to distinguish it from the 99% of surrounding crap. So if you give only positive reviews to virtually every record on your magazine (nowadays, websites) how can people tell which ones are the ones that are really worth listening to, from the ones that the reviewer felt pity for, or the ones where he's is just focusing on the positive aspects because its record label pays for advertising?
I've always been of the theory that you need to be honest and say it out loud when you dislike something and people will trust you a lot more when you recommend something to them. Don't you think so?
The Hard Data may have started three years ago today with the birth of this blog, but the real Juan Data the hard writer actually debuted in the US in 2001 with a controversial one-of-a-kind editorial I wrote about Shakira's then-recent crossover to the Anglo market on the aforementioned magazine. We received so many e-mails and even some actual letters (handwritten, on real paper!) because of that editorial that soon I was allowed to write more button-pushing articles and reviews (like that explosive coverage article for the Latin Grammys of 2002). So I started building a tiny reputation as someone who would say things that apparently many others thought but wouldn't dare put in words. Of course, I knew that there were always limitations to my free speech because as they say, free press is only free for the owner of the press. I wasn't the owner of the media and the media was surviving on advertising--a big chunk of it coming from record labels. I knew the only way to be 100% honest was to manage my own media and write all the shit that I wanted without it having to be cut and polished by a responsible editor in chief. I knew that because, before moving to the US, I used to be a successful fanzine publisher for many years in Argentina's underground.
It took me a very long time between that realization and the actual inauguration of The Hard Data, three years ago. A very long time because I sort of took a partial leave of absence from the music industry between the years 2003 and 2006, when my interests shifted towards another industry, something more adult oriented... (oh, and don't bother googling juan data + porn, I did all that naughty stuff under other various aliases).
But the idea was still there and my love for music never faded away. In 2006 I was at LAMC promoting the release of Koxmoz's debut album when I briefly reunited with my former bosses from La Banda Elástica, then recently relaunched as a website, and I remember telling the publisher something in the lines of "I wanna write Vice magazine-style record reviews, but about Latin music." His answer was something like "you can't do that in the Latin niche because we are very few, we all know each other and people really get offended, they take it personal," and then he added "but if you ever do it, I'll definitely read it!"
After doing it sporadically and in Spanish for a while on my previous blog, I decided in early 2008 it was time to make the switch into English to reach a wider audience. Maybe not too coincidentally that was also the moment I decided to pursue a more mercenary-inclined DJ career. Up to that point I was mainly DJing at friend's house parties and small events where I got to play whatever I wanted, but during the second half of 2007 I started "selling out" and playing commercial events to be able to pay the bills. This changed drastically my perception of music, leaning toward a more utilitarian angle and forcing me to leave behind (at least some of) my snobbish attitude while embracing massive dance-floor oriented music. Also not at all coincidentally that was the copernican moment in Latin music history when all of a sudden cumbia started crossing over to the Anglo audience.
It felt like all the signs were aligned in that direction so I decided to clean up my act a bit by getting rid of all the embarrassing triple-x evidence of my dirty past, and start from scratch with a new (masked) persona and a new blog where I could expose all my un-journalistic, unedited, impulsive writing; all honest personal opinions, with attitude, sense of humor and total lack of respect for any big name or institution. In other words, the type of writing that I wouldn't dare submit for a "professional" gig.
I do still write professionally on the side, and I still do my journalistic duties of thorough research and virtual objectivity. But this blog proved to be a lot more fun. Here I can allow myself to play dumb, to admit my ignorance beforehand and still go ahead and make a (probably unfair) judgment, to make questionable politically-incorrect generalizations, to base my opinions simply on personal anecdotal experience or to even write a whole review without even opening the shrink-wrap of a CD and basing my judgment solely on the graphic design or the names of the songs. And then the real fun comes when readers (mostly casual web-surfers who are unfamiliar with the blog's dominant tone and just dropped by by accident) get offended and send me hate mail, like the three moronic merengue listeners from the East Coast who last week took it as a personal offense that I did not like Rita Indiana's album (I wish there were many more like them. They make this experience complete).
So here we are, three years later, still iconoclastic and impertinent, still not kissing asses, still a trusted source for brutally honest critique. Let's hope for three more, or actually a lot more years, of more unadulterated, opinionated reviews. And for the haters: you don't have to agree with me, these are just my personal views, you are entitled to have your own and free to open your own blog and share them with the world, just don't be a coward and sign it with your real name, as I do. After all, it's not so hard.

Juan Data

BEST 11 ALBUMS OF 2010

2010-12-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

And I left this one list for the end. It's really hard for me to compile a list of 11 albums, because, as I've pointed out many times before, I don't really care for albums that much, I prefer smaller formats like singles and EPs. I get albums, I listen to them once, I save the songs I like and/or can use on my sets and I get rid of the rest and never listen to it again. In this time and age, when like 90% of the music DJ's play come from soundcloud and shared files alike, albums are almost an anomaly kept alive only to please nostalgic rock fans and capricious record label execs. There are extremely few albums I like as a whole where I can enjoy each and every one of the songs, a lot less if I can only count Latin music albums, for this blog. So here we go, these are the 11 albums I saved in their entirety in 2010, without deleting any of the songs from my hard-drive. (Compilations and reissues don't qualify).

1.- FRENTE CUMBIERO MEETS MAD PROFESSOR
File under: Cumbia-dub.
Reason to keep it all: I've been waiting for this to be released for over two years and honestly, I wouldn't be able to wait much more. Since I saw that video of Mad Professor mixing this on youtube, I knew this was going to be a must-have, I'm happy to announce I wasn't wrong in my prediction.
Mixability: Out of 14 tracks, 13 went straight to my playlist and you'll definitely hear some of it on my next megamix. Most tracks come in two versions, the original and the dubbed-out one. Great for playing around and do some live remixing.
Favorite track: "Chuchusteady"
Available: CD if you happen to live in Colombia, Amazon.com for everybody else.

2.- KUMBIA QUEERS-La Gran Estafa del Tropipunk
File under: Kumbia Grrrls With Attitude.
Reason to keep it all: Toy Selectah and Pablo Lescano both contributed to the production of this masterpiece. Need any more reasons?
Mixability: Unlike Queers previous work, this one is obviously a lot more DJ friendly, with plenty of club-oriented bangers. Still they keep it real to their punk roots and that's why I love them so fucking much!
Favorite track: "Celosa"
Available: In Argentina and Mexico only?

3.- CALLE 13-Entren Los Que Quieran
File under: Rap en español with brain.
Reason to keep it all: Anything with Residente rapping on it is worth keeping because you keep discovering dope hidden verses with further attentive listening.
Mixability: It's not a club-oriented album, but still has a couple of dance-floor bangers. He even dumbs down the lyrics level on "Vamos a Portarnos Mal," an otherwise-mediocre merengue-rap tailor-made for the evidently drunk and raunchy late-night crowd. And it works great.
Favorite track: "El Hormiguero."
Available: If you could find this blog, you certainly have enough knowledge to find this album -or its bootleg- without any effort.

4.- PONCHO-Ponchototal

File under: Daft-Punk meets Argentine rock.
Reason to keep it all: From the first one to the last one, they're are all certified club bangers. I personally didn't care for the Banda de Turistas' song (paradoxically that's the one they made a video of), but over all this album has no filler.
Mixability: You can tell when a great DJ is the brain behind a great album because all the tracks are ready to be mixed, beats are strong and they have monumental break-downs
Favorite track: "D.I.S.C.O." has crossover potential to become a massive worldwide hit.
Available: Everywhere Nacional Records CD's and/or downloads are available.

5.- SEU JORGE & ALMAZ

File under: Brazilian soul.
Reason to keep it all: Honestly, I first bought only four tracks from this, but I like them so much that I went back and bought the whole album.
Mixability: Not really a dance piece, actually quite the opposite. I just bought this one to play while we have breakfast with bloody-marys with my girlfriend during the weekends. I'm planning on sampling some of it on my next megamix.
Favorite track: "Cirandar"
Available: Everywhere, in every format, including double vinyl LP!

6.- MATORRALMAN-Guateque Estelar

File under: Sample-based retro psychedelia.
Reason to keep it all: I loved the concept, the aesthetics, the sound, the samples used. It's very original. I just wish more music like this would come out from Mexico instead of all the other crap.
Mixability: It's definitely mix-friendly but not necessarily dance-floor oriented unless you have a very open minded crowd. Perfect for DJing at cocktail lounges.
Favorite track: "Go Go Girl."
Available: Everywhere Nacional Records CD's and/or downloads are available.

7.- EMPRESARIOS-Sabor Tropical

File under: All the Latin rhythms you can eat.

Reason to keep it all: OK, maybe not all the album is that great. I don't really care for the reggaetón tracks. If I wanted to play reggaetón in my set I already have all the commercial crap that's on the radios and that's what the reggaetón audience likes anyway. The dub, the cumbia and the Latin funk are exquisite.
Mixability: It has the Fort Knox Five seal of approval, there's no doubt that this will be fire on the turntables like everything else they release.
Favorite track: "Cumbia."
Available: It'll hopefully be available soon. Vinyl singles? Please?!

8.- GRUPO FANTASMA-El Existential

File under: Chicano Cumbia/Latin Funk.
Reason to keep it all: Best cumbia live band in the US and maybe world wide.
Mixability: Real cumbia lovers will dig this for sure. Pop-cumbia, nü-cumbia and sonidero listeners won't get it, but fuck them, I've been playing at least three of these tracks on my sets and I don't care if they get them or not, I love them!
Favorite track: "La Conozco."
Available: On Itunes, Emusic, etc. Probably on CD somewhere. Unfortunately no vinyl.

9.- SACASSAIA-Sampleando Deus e o Mundo

File under: MPC-based Brazilian hip-hop and beyond.
Reason to keep it all: After listening to so much orthodox Paulista hip-hop and cheesy baile funk Carioca, it was very refreshing to find out such eclectic mix of styles and influences, combined with admirable sense of good taste and sophistication while being accessible to pop crossover audiences.
Mixability: I've been mixing "El Culebrón" in my sets a lot but there are plenty other DJ friendly tracks, like their remarkable cover of "Genius of Love."
Favorite track: "Ululai"
Available: Free download on their site!

10.- CHAVEZ-Morón City Groove

File under: Nü-cumbia-reggae-urban-pop.
Reason to keep it all: I've been spinning the demo versions of many of these tracks for a couple of years before the official release dropped. Now I just replaced them with the new, better sounding versions.
Mixability: Six out of the ten tracks are mandatory on my sets. They blend in perfectly with every nü-cumbia out there.
Favorite track: "Antares"
Available: Only in Argentina?

11.- SKA CUBANO-Mambo Ska

File under: Mambo Ska?
Reason to keep it all: They are from England, they combine Cuban with Jamaican roots in their music and somehow they manage to come up with some of the best analog cumbias any hardcore Colombian cumbiero could conceive. I loved every single release by these guys since they came out, I'm sorry I feel I neglected them a bit on this blog.
Mixability: Not necessarily mixer-friendly since they have not been recorded with a DJ as target audience. But you can definitely just go ahead and drop any of these in your sets and real cumbia appreciators will go nuts.
Favorite track: "Cumbia del Monte"
Available: Itunes, Emusic, Amazon and everywhere else.

BEST OF 2010: The Hard Data Awards II

2010-12-25T12:47:00.000-08:00

BEST EP: Suave Patria by Mexican Institute of Sound

There were a lot of good EPs released in 2010. Especially since that was the preferred format for most ZZK Records' releases of this year: Frikstailers' Bicho de Luz, El Remolón's Pangeático, Tremor's Caracol, Lagartigeando's Neobailongo. Not that many albums, but I don't care because I like this format a lot.
The reason I picked Suave Patria is first because I love the idea of Nacional Records releasing more vinyl and second because it plays like a cohesive cut-and-paste collage mixtape more than a collection of independent tracks, and they are all equally great. I think that's a great idea. And I loved seeing Camilo Lara focused on his DJ work rather than his dorky singing/pseudo-rapping, which is fun as a novelty for a bit but it soon wears off.
OTHER CANDIDATES: All the ones mentioned above from ZZK plus DJ Lengua's Cruzando, Chicano Batman's self-titled and DJ Sabo's Bersa #6.
WORST EP: Can't think of any at the moment.

BEST REISSUE OR COMPILATION: Mambo Loco by Anibal Velasquez

Honestly, I'm still trying to come up with the money to purchase this LP, it's quite pricey as an import and I usually don't like to spend more like, say, $10 on a record. But this one is definitely worth it. I know it and I know I'll definitely buy it soon.
I was gonna choose VampiSoul's Cumbia Beat for this category, but they already won best art. Besides there were a lot of amazing reissues released this year, mostly by European labels (like this one by Analog Africa). It's like all of a sudden they realized there had been some great music recorded in the 60's and 70's in South America and originals are extremely hard to find and the few that are available are victims of speculation on ebay.
OTHER CANDIDATES: Ranil's Jungle Party (Masstropicas), Palenque Palenque! (Soundway) Roots of Chicha II (Barbés) and The Afrosound of Colombia (Vampi Soul)
WORST REISSUE: Diggin' Down Argentina (Argie garage rock oddities from the pre-Rock Nacional era, who wants to listen to that? Not me! And that ugly ass cover, ewww!)

BEST NEW ARTIST: Frente Cumbiero

As a Colombian, Frente Cumbiero has the knowledge and respect of the old cumbia tradition, but unlike other Colombian neo-cumbia artists he's been very focused on cumbia's migration, mutations and adaptations throughout the Americas. That gives him an unique perspective to approach cumbia that I really... envy. Part DJ, part digger, part cut-and-paste producer, part live band leader, part historian, this guy is everything that I wish I was, and better. Plus, he got to hang out with Mad Professor!
He's been doing stuff for a while but it wasn't until 2010 that he had his first official release. 2010 is Frente Cumbiero's year.
OTHER CANDIDATES: Los Reyes De La Milanga, Don Conejo, Matorralman, Lagartijeando, Munchi.
WORST NEW ARTIST: Paco Mendoza.

BEST NEW MUSIC BLOG: Cassette Blog

Hosted by no other than the Frikstailers themselves, this blog is just a couple of months old and it's already making a lot of noise with their constant avalanche of new content. I don't know where this guys find the time to do this, I mean, with all the touring and all the side projects they've been working on (like DJ Sandro de América and Sonidero Cordobestia), but it really seems like everything these guys have the Midas touch or something and everything they set out to do, turns into a big hit.

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Rita Indiana's debut.

There was so fucking much blog-buzz about this Dominincan woman for the last year or so that at a point it felt like a universal tacit agreement that she was like the best next thing to come. Then her album finally dropped and I was like bleh. I listened to it only once and I didn't like any of the songs. I'd never include any of them on a DJ set, voluntarily, and I very much doubt people will come up and request them. I don't think she's so original or ingenious as other bloggers pointed out. And I can't get over that fact that she looks like a Dutch professional Dominatrix, or what a Dutch professional Dominatrix would look like in my imagination, (because I've never met one). It's probably the whole tall-skinny-woman-with-short-hair stereotype, which I find scary and utterly unappealing. I mean, if I ever, for some reason, wanted to see a female Dominican star, I'd go for someone who looks more like, let's say Maluca, right?

BIGGEST BULLSHIT BUZZ: Moombahton tie with Tribal Guarachero

Nowadays anybody can mix two existing genres together, change the pitch and come up with a made-up word and call it a "new" genre. So what the fuck is so special about Moombahton? I'm still trying to figure it out. It sounds pretty much like everything else that's out there. Dave Nada invented that, nada. He's probably really good at self-marketing (he even has a creation "myth" and a wikipedia page dedicated to it) and he definitely has the right connections to get the right people in the blogesphere to write about it. There are probably thousands others creating "new" genres out there every day, they just don't come up with stupid names like that, so nobody talk about them.
And Tribal Guarachero? It's just cheesy bad early 90's techno with a cumbia guiro beat sped up to 130 BPM. And it sounds horrible. It sounds like cheap productions made by teenagers in their cheap computers with the demo sounds of fruityloops, because that's exactly what it is. But Toy Selectah came out saying it was the best next thing and all of a sudden, suckers all over bought into it. Granted, Toy talked to me personally about new cumbia back in like 2003 and I didn't give it any credit at all back then, so, you might wanna follow his advice instead of mine, he definitely knows a lot more than me about this shit. Maybe I'm just too old and the whole raver-teen-on-ecstasy thing is not for me anymore.

BEST OF 2010-The Hard Data Awards

2010-12-24T11:04:00.000-08:00

BEST ALBUM COVER ART: Cumbia Beat Vol.1 (Vampisoul, 2010)

Dear record industry, do you want to start selling records again? Get some kick ass graphic art for your album covers. At least it worked with me. I actually bought this album twice! First as a digital download as soon as I saw it on emusic, and later, as I promised on my review, I bought again on vinyl. (The last time I remember buying an album twice it was M.I.A.'s Arular in 2005, which I bought on vinyl and CD). And it wasn't a cheap purchase either, but it's a double album with a bunch of visually appealing inserts and notes and just that cover in itself, designed by Victor Coyote Aparicio is frame-worthy. And it says Vol. 1 meaning we can all hope for more of thees goodness coming up soon. I can't wait.
OTHER CANDIDATES: DJ Lengua's Cruzando, Monareta's Fried Speakers, Gotan Project's Tango 3.0, Sacassaia's Sampelando Deus e o Mundo, Rita Indiana's El Juidero
WORST COVER ART: Cuarto Poder's In tha House.

BEST ALBUM TITLE: La Gran Estafa del Tropipunk by Kumbia Queers

The title is an obvious reference to the Sex Pistols' mockumentary The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which Spanish translation was La Gran Estafa Del Rock and Roll. And nobody could embody that perfect title better than the the Kumbia Queers. It's ingenious, witty, cynical and most of all, true.
OTHER CANDIDATES: Sampelando Deus e o Mundo by Sacassaia, Neobailongo by Lagartijeando, Piratas de Sudamerica by El Guincho, Discotape by Capri.
WORST TITLE: In Tha House by Cuarto Poder.

BEST ALBUM INTRO: Calle 13's "Intro" for Entren Los Que Quieran

When I had my phone-interview with Calle 13's Visitante he kept repeating "wait until you hear the intro, it's all in there." He was right. With a style and sense of humor that resembles Family Guy's musical bits at their very best, this is quite possibly the best intro to a Spanish-language album I've ever heard. I can just close my eyes and imagine some cartoon characters dancing while singing "nos cogieron por el culo."
OTHER CANDIDATES: La Mala Rodríguez's "En la Línea" from Dirty Bailarina (just because she opens an album repeating "deja que te coja" and -taking it out of dialect context- I wanna let her do just that).
WORST INTRO: Dante Spinetta's "Pyramide" for the album of the same title. I wonder where I found the strength to keep listening after that awful auto-tuned monstrosity.

BEST MASH-UP/REMIX: Aaliyah's "Try Otra Vez" by DJ Still Life

Brooklyn's own DJ Still Life released this collection of Aaliyah's classics vocals over tropical beats right around the anniversary of her death. I played this one that same night and it was an instant success so it remained in all my DJ sets since then. I never even played any of the other mashups included in this digital release. Just that one.
OTHER CANDIDATES: "Hola Cumbia," (Lyrics Born vs Calle 13), by DJ Zeph, "Jimmy Cumbia" (Los Empresarios vs Old Dirty Bastard) by J-Boogie, "Mostro" by Dante Spinetta (remix by Super Guachín), "Fuego" by Bomba Estéreo (Frikstailers remix)
WORST MASH-UP: Pitbull & 50Cent Pshickedelic Cumbiass by Brujjas (nothing that has those to walking insults to rap music together in one track can be any good).

BEST 7'' SINGLE: "Ananas Tornillo"/"Pitchito" by Frente Cumbiero

I already explained this one before, so don't be lazy and go read it in my previous post. Oh, and go buy this single right now, if you haven't done so yet, because this, I can guarantee, will turn into a collectible item.
OTHER CANDIDATES: "Silbando" by Los Rivereños, "Dina's Mambo/La Muralla" by Bio-Ritmo, "Primavera en la Selva" by Chicha Libre.
WORST 7'': I love this format way too much to hate any.

BEST COLLABORATION: Li Saumet + Niña Dioz + El Remolón + Villa Diamante on "Cumbia Prohibida"

OK, maybe it's not their best song, the lyrics are not like original or anything, but it was probably written on the spot the same day of the recording and the results are quite powerful, in fact "recontra-power." What makes this collaboration so significant is the fact that it unites nü-cumbia ambassadors from the three main nations where this movement has developed: Colombia, México and Argentina. I think it's the first track to have artist from those three nations together, trying to find the common ground in their distinctive approaches to cumbia. The only other example I can think of is the still unreleased "Cumbia Nena" song we did with Nes (from Mexico), Ephniko (from Colombia) and myself (Argentina) as Bondi Blaster.
OTHER CANDIDATES: Shakira + Calle 13 on "Gordita," Don Omar + Lucenzo "Kuduro," Poncho + Shannon Funchess on "D.I.S.C.O"
WORST COLLABO: Shakira + Pitbull on "Rabiosa," tie with Dante + Adrián Dárgelos on "Cumpa-El Mero Mero"

MONARETA-Fried Speakers (Nacional Records, 2010)

2010-12-22T13:56:00.000-08:00

The Colombians-by-the-way-of-Brooklyn Monareta have evolved quite a bit since I found out about them through one of those early Nacional Records compilations with that song "Matanza Funk." I didn't like them back then, because of the wacky rapping, but later I started to feel more and more intrigued when songs like "Llama" and "Raimundo llevate al mundo" came out and they started to lean more toward the Afro-Colombian sounds of the cumbia family. I still play those two songs quite regularly on my sets.
Their new album satisfies with a surplus my need for ñu-cumbias with great tracks like "La Cumbia Invasiva," "Gitana Llorona" and "La Safor" which I'll be spinning in the near future at parties and mixtapes, no doubt about it. Their approach to cumbia is similar to that or other fellow Colombians like Pernet and (pre-Li Saumet) Bomba Estéreo. The focus is on the hypnotic beats more than in making songs, there's very few vocals and I appreciate that from a DJ perspective, because it leaves room for a lot of rework.
But then theres some odd shit in this album that totally threw me off. True story, I had it playing the other day as background music while doing some home cleaning, and my girlfriend has one of those multiple CD players and when this song "Bogotá Brooklyn" came out I honestly thought the CD had changed to one of hers. I was like, "Yo! Is that one of your CDs playing?" maybe, I thought, this is music she listens to while she does yoga or something. Man! What the fuck was that about? It sounds all new-agey and shit like if it was the soundtrack of some cry-inducing documentary about pre-pubescent girls forced into prostitution in some banana republic or something like that they would play on PBS. As if that wasn't enough, there's another song called "Las Rutas del Mar" that I can't even describe because I wasn't able to listen, I felt instinctively compelled to press skip right after that woman started singing. Ew.
Aside from those unpleasant surprises, the album is overall pretty good, the art is amazing and their dubby electro-cumbias are some of the bests in the genre released this year. Just keep making more of those, please.

BEST 11 LIVE SHOWS OF 2010

2010-12-21T16:12:00.000-08:00

Obviously this selection is extremely restricted due to the fact that 1) I can only review shows that I attended, 2) since I haven't traveled much lately, most of the shows that I attended were around the Bay Area and 3) since I pretty much don't have any disposable income to be able to afford show tickets, I mostly just went to shows where I got free access because I was listed as opening act. Fortunately there were quite many of those.

1.- ANA TIJOUX @ La Peña, Berkeley, CA: Maybe it wasn't the best show of the year (she wasn't satisfied with the limited sound capabilities of the venue), but at least for me it was the most significant. I had been dreaming about this particular show for almost a decade. I remember chatting with Ana, back then, plotting her US invasion, and I remember telling her, "you should come and play at La Peña, they're gonna love you there." It just seemed appropriate. La Peña started over 30 years ago as a cultural center of sorts for the Chilean political exiles living in the Bay Area, and Ana was a Chilean born during her parents' exile in France. When I was first contacted by the tour manager asking me for venues where I would have her perform in the Bay, La Peña was obviously the first one that came to mind. Being able to open for her, an artists that I truly admire and a beautiful human being that I'm lucky to count among my close friends, was a dream come true, even if I played for less than 20 minutes and nobody was actually paying attention to my set. Plus, the impromptu jam with Funky C (from Los Tetas, the Chilean funk group with whom Anita debuted as a recording artist doing her first guest appearance) was really dope.

2.- BOOM BOOM KID @ Gilman, Berkeley, CA: Every year, right after Halloween, I suffer a regression to my hardcore punk age and go see Boom Boom Kid. The ultimate Argentine punk rocker comes every year and usually forms a temporary band with local musicians and goes on tour for a month or so. This time however, there was no band and no tour. He only came to take care of some business (new release coming up soon, in vinyl!) and, since he was in town, he did a surprise acoustic show, with just his guitar and a notebook full of handwritten lyrics. Only about 15 people showed up, nothing compared to previous years and considering his loyal following, but it was perfect just like that. There was no moshpit, no stage-diving, none of his usual crowd surfing acrobatics, just him and his songs, and it felt really intimate, especially after he invited all the guests to come up on stage with him. The best part, however, was not the show itself, but the nighttime bicycle trip to and back from the venue with my friend Pablo, riding by the Bay's shore on the last beautiful warm night of the year. Great memories.

3.- BOMBA ESTEREO @ Sterngrove, San Francisco, CA: In 2009 Bomba Estéreo had their Bay Area debut at La Peña in Berkeley and I was pissed off that they were not able to find a promoter who'd have them play in San Francisco for a larger audience. It finally happened this past summer when the Colombian neo-cumbia outfit got to perform at a massive free concert at the park and the mainstream Latino crowd that never goes to small venues and underground shows got to experience them live.

4.- CHICO TRUJILLO @ La Peña, Berkeley, CA: Another Chilean playing at La Peña. Chico Trujillo gave the best cumbia show of the year, hands down. With the energy, attitude and urgency of a punk rock performance they lay the bridge between the mestizo rock of Mano Negra and the party band craziness and kitsch of Los Auténticos Decadentes. For a while, they almost make you forget that they're actually doing mostly covers of old cumbias and boleros from like four decades ago. I got to DJ as an opening act on this one too, but the most fun I had it when jumping in the moshpit while sweating my ass off to the rhythm of "La Escoba."

5.- CELSO PIÑA @ Mezzanine, San Francisco, CA: The unquestionable king of Mexican cumbia and the good father of the neo-cumbia movement. In 2001 he changed cumbia once and for all with that milestone collaboration with Toy Selectah and his Sonidero Nacional, introducing for the first time cumbia as a cool new thing for the alterlatino audience of the post-MTV era. In 2010 I was finally able to see him live and I also had the honor of opening for him, alongside fellow DJ friends Santero and EKG. We've got ripped off by the promoters and never got payed, but it was ok because we've got to meet "el jinete del acordeón" after the show and he was mad cool.

6.- FRIKSTAILERS @ Red Devil Lounge, San Francisco, CA: I've been wanting to open for a Zizek show since they first came and I finally got my chance in 2010 when Frikstailers and El-G came back to the Bay. Unfortunately only half of the Frikstailers duo made it but he still gave a mind-blowing performance with all that Bambaatesque paraphernalia and futuristic gimmicks. Unfortunately too, very few people turned up (it was a Monday night) so I pretty much played a whole set for the bartender and the sound guy.

7.- CHICANO BATMAN @ The Layover, Oakland, CA: Memorable Bay Area debut for the LA oldies band signed to Unicornio Records. They came for the release of their great album and they amazed everybody in the house that night with some trippy psychedelic shit, some cumbias and those shirts that made it all seem like if we had collectively been transported to our parent's prom night.

8.- R.A.P. SQUAD & STRONGHOLD SOUND @ The Layover, Oakland, CA: So I invited Nes to perform our song, "Cumbia Nena" at the Stronghold Sound record release party and without letting me know in advance, he showed up at the venue with his whole crew, R.A.P. Squad. For a second I honestly thought the night was gonna go to hell because their thugged-out aesthetics were going to scare the shit outta the dominant white-hispter crowd of the bar. But then they got on the mic and it was amazing! With the help of Dub Snakkr on the turntables they became most talked-about performers of the night. People were asking me, "where did you find them? They're like the Mexican Wu-Tang Clan!"

9.- ELY GUERRA @ The Independent, San Francisco, CA: Back in 2001 I saw this girl live in Los Angeles for the first time and I instantly fell in love with her and her music. Her album Lotofire has been in my Top-10 favorite Spanish-language albums ever since. In 2010 and I was invited to open for her and it was great. I'm not much into her music style nowadays, but she's still an incredible performer and she's definitely more talented than the other contemporary Mexi-rock-diva, Julieta Venegas, who unfairly gets all the media hoopla because she makes silly songs for teenagers.

10.- LOS AUTENTICOS DECADENTES @ Illusions, Palo Alto, CA: I love Los Decadentes. I've said it many times, they are the best party band in Latin America. I've seen them live innumerable times since 1991 and they never disappoint me. One of their main advantage, comparing them to other super-energetic party bands, is that they have 12 members and they rotate a lot. At least four of them become lead singer at a certain point and the other ones can rest for a while or take over some instrument, so the band never loses any momentum and they can keep up their crazy exuberant on-stage chaos for like three hours, non stop. The only reason why this is not higher in the top-11 is that the shady promoters who hired me as an opening act ruined the night for me with their mobster antics.

11.- ENRIQUE BUNBURY @ The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA: I never gave a rat's ass about this Spanish clown and I find the fetishistic fascination that Mexican orthodox rockers have for him to be completely absurd. But man, was it fun to go that that concert! Even if it's just to make fun of the abundant Mexifan impersonators and all those black-leather-jacket alpha-machos who go to worship this homoerotic show by an ambiguous male diva who aims to be the Spanish Jim Morrison but ends up being more like Raphael. Cynicism aside, his whole performance was clockwork perfect.