South American music and culture magazine

It was 2010 when I first discovered 1977. No that’s not the opening line from a young adult, time-travel novel; its when a good friend sat me down and showed me Ana Tijoux’s breakout album, 1977.  I was instantly enthralled with this strong female voice spitting Spanish stanzas over hard-hitting beats, becoming hooked as this French Chilean rapera started to gain traction as an international artist. Continue Reading

“Tengo tres días que no como, cuatro que no bebo agua.”  “It’s been three days since I’ve eaten; four days since I’ve drank water.” This opening line from my favorite track, “Macaco” sums up my listening experience of Novalima’s Karimba. Continue Reading

World music label Putumayo has a noble but tricky mission. It aims “to introduce new global music to broad audiences” with ethnic-themed aggregations. This objective is challenging from a business standpoint. Any good introduction to a new music genre should aim to get listeners hooked and wanting more. But once your audience has educated itself and started down its own path of musical discovery, World Music 101-type albums may no longer appeal to their newly developed tastes. Continue Reading

Global music moguls Soundway Records have released another bag of Colombian treats with The Original Sound of Cumbia: The History of Colombian Cumbia & Porro As Told By The Phonograph 1948-79. This time round, we are introduced to the musical sensations of cumbia and porro – both styles richly embedded within Colombian heritage and its diverse soundscape. Continue Reading

Los Pirañas is a side project of members of Frente Cumbiero and Meridian Brothers, two of Colombia’s most interesting bands. From the first beat of the opening track it’s quite clear that Los Pirañas is a vehicle for them to try out some of their most far-out ideas. There’s thumping drums, a bassline that’s quite simply a relentless New York No Wave onslaught and guitars that sound alternately like elastic and metal, together making a sound that you might want to call “tropical noise”. Continue Reading

Ever wondered what it would sound like if Sao Paulo’s underground scene decamped to the US, joined up with a number of jazz musicians and hip-hop MCs, and attempted their own unique version of Sly & The Family Stone? Ekundayo is pretty much what that would sound like. Continue Reading

Upside Down is a follow-up of sorts to Visions of Dawn. That album, which featured the trio of Joyce, Mauricio Maestro and Nana Vasconcelos, was recorded in 1976 but lay unreleased until 2009, when Far Out Recordings decided to release it. Upon it’s release it seemed to instantly jump to “classic” status, and so Far Out asked Maestro and Vasconcelos to record a follow-up. This is what they came up with. Continue Reading

The Viaje EP starts with a murmur before guiding itself into life. This is a release all about travelling, full of inquisitive notes, open-ended melodies and a restless sense of invention. It’s the third EP that Venezuelan group Dolli have released this year and definitely one of their best. Continue Reading

DJs frequently have two fundamental urges in constant conflict. The first is their natural tendency to want to bring new music to people, the second, their slightly miserly tendency to withhold the identities of their best tunes from others so as to have those ‘special’ tunes in their sets that no-one else does. Captain Planet has been the source of a great number of my ‘special’ tunes over the last few years so it’s with great pleasure that I can now become a nice DJ and recommend them to you, now they are all wrapped up in one LP. Continue Reading

The choice of “Carapalavra” as first track on Longe de Onde instantly marks this out as a different album to Karina Buhr‘s debut Eu Mentí Pra Voce. The screeching guitars and twisted wordplay of this opening song signal that Buhr is not a conventional Brazilian cantora. Far from it, it’s clear after listening to this album that Buhr is one of the most interesting artists working in Brazil right now. Continue Reading

With the current upsurge in popularity of Latin-influenced sounds in the English capital, nine-piece band Wara are sure riding the wave of Afro-Cuban-loving-grooves. Their recent tour of festivals such as Glastonbury, The Big Chill, Barbican’s Blaze Festival, and not to mention soon-to-come gigs at Camden’s Roundhouse and Ronnie Scotts, only cement their promising future ahead. With their larger-than-life style comprised of Cuban timba, cumbia beats, raucous rumba and touches of hiphop, reggae and jazz, this should be no surprise at all. Continue Reading

Following in the footsteps of the Peruvian chicha revival, Massachusetts based Masstrópicas have dusted off the master tapes and re-released one of the genre’s previously overlooked classics, Grupo 2000‘s El Destape. First released in 1974, the band’s début LP went on to become a much sought after collectors item for chicha aficionados but remained unknown outside of Peru, until now. Continue Reading