South American music and culture magazine

In 1992, in the Bar de Dona Edna, in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, the musician and cultural agitator Francisco de Assis França announced to his friends, “I mixed a hip-hop beat with a maracatu groove and it turned out awesome. I’ll call it mangue.” ‘Mangue’ means ‘wetlands,’ a type of landscape common in Recife, where lots of people take their livelihood from, especially catching crab. França, a.k.a. Chico Science, was surrounded by the central figures of a cultural movement that would become the most important engine of innovation in Brazilian popular music for the following 20 years, Mangue Beat. They had a few more beers to discuss the concept, and off they went, for the following months, to write manifestoes in Ecology, Music, Art, and Technology.
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It’s impossible to spend anytime in Montevideo, Uruguay, without suddenly feeling like you’re in the middle of a parade. The sound of drums are everywhere … maybe even moreso than in Brazil. It all has to do with Uruguay’s heritage and the African slaves that were brought to these shores in the early 19th century. Every Sunday the slaves would get dressed up, dust off their drums and have a bit of a shindig on one of Montevideo’s promenades, and the new sound spread throughout the city. The rhythm was called Candombe and it’s become the unofficial sound of Montevideo’s streets.
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Chicha or Peruvian cumbia, as it is often known, is on the rise. Since Barbes Records released The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru in 2007 the popularity of the genre has grown both internationally and in its native Peru. There, it has always had its fans in the lower classes, ever since Los Demonios del Mantaro had the first chichan hit “La Chichera” in 1966, but it was generally frowned upon by the other classes who aligned poverty and violence with chicha. Since the compilation was released, attracting much international interest, perceptions seem to have changed somewhat with Peruvians now accepting that this music is something they can be proud of. Continue Reading

“In my land people dance to cumbia with candles and the drum gets happy.”
Muchachas Cumbiamberas, Andres Landero

During my first visit to South America I held Cumbia in nothing but total disdain. It seemed to be a loud, obnoxious music constantly blasting out an identical beat from bus speakers, from out of houses and on every street or place where I found myself. A couple of years later I heard Lucho Bermudez and everything changed. The rhythm was the same but there was a sense of place to the music, a joy to the performance and a jauntiness that I never found in the popular Cumbia tunes that captured much of South and Central America.
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Forró is music for dancing! Developed in the North-east of Brazil, it is characterised by its weaving accordion and insistent rhythms and is one of the most popular forms of music in Brazil. In fact, although samba is thought as being the main musical exponent of Brazil, music from the North-east actually accounts for 40% of all sales. Forró’s humble origins as a folk music in the 40s and 50s saw it labelled as ‘hick’ or ‘country’ music by some, but forro-inspired albums by Gilberto Gil and Gal Costa saw it gain many new fans during the seventies, leading to its current popular status.
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MPB is an acronym for Music Popular Brasileira or, in more English words, Pop Music of Brazil. It’s an amalgamation of styles that really took hold in the 70s and now accounts for a large amount of the music made in Brazil.
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