South American music and culture magazine

Barranquilla Carnival is one of the most colourful and intense carnivals in South America and second in size only to Brazil’s. As artist Diego Samper Martinez puts it, the Carnival of Barranquilla is “the ultimate people’s celebration — the merriest, the loosest, true to the free-wheeling Caribbean spirit.” Continue Reading

Over the past sixty years, the Colombian music genre Cumbia has rocked dance floors in it’s native land as well as the global music stage. However, cumbia has not always been so popular with the music-loving masses. Its early beginnings, found at the mouth of the Magdalena River and the Atlantic Ocean were largely viewed with disdain, especially for its association with societal lower classes. It was seen as a highly inappropriate dance, dating back to Colombia’s colonial past and consisted of a somewhat ‘sexualised’ dance between the sexes. It was a courtship ritual that celebrated the musical, as well as social interaction between people of African ancestry and the indigenous people of Colombia known as zambos. 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

We have 3 copies of the latest instalment in Soundway Records’ excellent series of releases on Colombia music to giveaway. Aqui Los Bravos! The Best Of Michi Sarmiento y Su Combo Bravo 1967-77 is a disc of pure dancefloor muscle from Colombia featuring some of the fiercest cumbias, descargas and guaguancós you will ever hear. Continue Reading

System Solar are one of the heaviest groups coming out of Colombia at the moment. They call themselves a ‘collective’ and this couldn’t fit them better. Each member is involved in all kind of enterprises but bring their expertise to the table for Systema Solar. What results is an modern audio-visual treat with it’s feet firmly stuck in the tradition of Colombia’s sound systems. These systems, which began to appear on Colombia’s Caribbean coast in the 50s, are known as picó’s, a word derived from pick-up though no-one really knows exactly why it was chosen. Some say it was because of the pick-up truck that people would arrive to parties in, others said it was due to the action of picking-up the needle before playing the next song, and others still say it was a name of a particular portable record player.
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