Bad Santa cumbia villera from the one and only Damas Gratis. Pablo Lescano is the most famous person I know who semi-regularly sends me insane emails. Some, like this recent one, contain amazing music. Hilarious lyrics thick with double entrendres.
[audio:http://lacongona.com/mp3/Damas_Gratis-Papa_Cruel_www.lacongona.com.mp3]
[Pablo Lescano of Damas Gratis]
“Give music this holiday season. Pablito Lescano warmly wishes you a merry Christimas and this song is my gift.“
cross-posted because everybody needs to hear
Head over to RCRDLBL to get an exclusive tune from the new cumbia / cumbia digital compilation, put together by the deepest digger I know, Sonido Martines!
Los Destellos – Elsa (Sonido Martines remix feat Fefe)
the jam in question is Sonido himself remixing legendary Peruvian chicha cumbia band, Los Destellos de Enrique Delgado, with vocal assistance by Fefe, a Brazilian firecracker. In one example of how Sonido Martines works, he tracked down Los Destellos, explained to them what was going on in the slippery world of ‘new cumbia’, and with their blessings got permission to flip this remix. Now-thing realness with respect for the foundational musicians!
the comp esta muy wapo… Sonido Martines presents: Nueva Cumbia Argentina! fresh heat from nu-skoolers like El Hijo de la Cumbia, Fauna, and Chancha Via Circuito, and visionary early material from DJ Taz and Damas Gratis, and more! 12″ and digital out now: iTunes / Amazon / Boomkat, etc. K VIVA LA KUMBIA!!
it goes down today, Wednesday Sept. 16 – I’ll be spinning an all-cumbia set at the Treehouse party. Free! It’s a gentle evening for the 9-5 set; I start around 10:30pm, so show up early… It goes down at Littlefield in Gowanus, alongside Treeboy, Gamall, and Raspberry Jones.
When I say all-cumbia, I mean it! Material you can find in many many places, such as Mexican shops in Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc., or via online stateside shops from Discos El Papi & Barba Azul. The point is, cumbia is close. So this set will contain no crunk cumbia, no ‘cumbia digital’, no bloggy remixes.
Expect current Mexican cumbia sonidera, with an emphasis on tracks that shout out Nueva York, like…
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Formula_5-LaCumbiaMaestra.mp3]Formula 5 – La Cumbia Maestra (a re-post but hey)
…alongside more classic material from the 60s 70s & 80s, like:
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Andres Landero-Canto a Cartagena (Betty Ochoa de Anillo).mp3]Andres Landero – Canto a Cartagena (written by Betty Ochoa de Anillo)
And be prepared for potentially cheesy sad love songs, like:
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Los_Star_Boys-La_Culpa.mp3]Los Star Boys – La Culpa (“we had problems, the blame goes to both of us”)
…and, darker still, songs about death:
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/LUCY GONZALES Y SU COMBO ORENCE – LA LEY PODEROSA.MP3]Lucy Gonzales y su Combo Orence – La Ley Poderosa
Great lyrics on this one, “The Powerful Law”. I have cumbia songs about Satan, but I don’t play those in public. On a tangentially related note, Spanish uses the same word for eschatology and scatology!
In closing – come through, come early, and enjoy this last one, an instrumental about the Lone Ranger’s scraper (in which we hear the sounds of his horse), from a DJ presumably named after Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix:
[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/D.J. Neo-Guacharaca del Llanero Solitario.mp3]
my alter-ego, Jace Clayton, will be performing a free ‘special all-Cumbia set’ in Brooklyn a few Wednesdays from now. Gowanus guacharaca! September 16, Treehouse @ Littlefield. An all-cumbia set is the sort of thing that only makes sense in my hometown, so come on through…
Tune in Mudd Up! with DJ Rupture on WFMU 91.1fm tonight at 7PM, as Roberto Ernesto Gyemant aka DJ Beto, the man responsible for putting together those wonderful volumes of 1960s and ’70s “cumbia tropical & calypso funk” from Panama, joins me to talk and share some incredible music. He had a curatorial hand in Soundway Records Panama compilations and the Colombia! Golden Age of Discos Fuentes as well. Deep compilations with informative liner notes, the real deal…
Of course, for those outside our FM broadcast range, WFMU offers live streaming and even has its own free iPhone app!
We (Lamin & I) have been fascinated with the music of Panama ever since our visit from Wayne Marshall and Raquel Z Rivera, editors of the Reggaeton book, broke down Panama’s relationship to Jamaica with some deadly tunes and erudite commentary. (Missed it? It’s streaming here. Subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast if you want downloadable versions of my weekly show: 
, 
Mudd Up! RSS.
Listen, get involved, throw in comments, phone in questions. Again, tonight @ 7PM.
For a warmup, check Beto’s mix of hard-to-find musica costeña Colombiana and tipica Panameña, streaming here.
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And if that’s not enough, here’s great CD rip of old school cumbias – although you might not guess it from the cover art featuring two cyber chicks (one in cowhide) and a tiny monkey sporting a baseball cap Memin Pinguin [breakdown on this Mexican-concocted Sambo here]. [via]
Scratchy gems include a Vietnam-themed war/love song with a call-and-response chorus.
I’m a bit too tired to narrativize my life, but the raw facts of the next five days are:
Today, this Friday, Dutty Artz goes to Boston: Jahdan Blakkamoore, Matt Shadetek, and I will be perform at the Institute of Contemporary Art’ s waterfront outside space, along with Nomo.
On Saturday, 2 events in D.F. Mexico City, both free! First, the ‘Cumbias de Caos’ picnic-talk (picnic as a model of sharing) with Mariana from Proyecto Sonidero and myself. Vamos a platicar un poco acerca del caos sonidero a lo largo y ancho de la calle, el internet y sus alrededores. This happens at 7pm in Miscelanea. Hugs to Las Teorias del Caos! The picnic talk will be video-streaming somewhere in interlandia.
Then we gather up our dancing shoes and relocate to the incredible terrace of the Centro Cultural de Espana. I play around midnite maybe? CCE has a great soundsystem. Last time I DJed here things got crazy. We’re going for crazier. (It’s right around the corner from Zocalo, the plaza, notable for its ridiculously large national flag and the smell of frankincense.)
If you haven’t gone to Mexico City, you should… It’s the kind of place where (this happened to me) suddenly you find 12 people in the flat where you’re staying (you’ve invited them up, apparently) at 2 A.M. and one of them is putting together an Afrosound compilation and then you all decide to go eat and the place you arrive at used to be a Chinese restaurant, but that flopped so it turned into yet another Mexican restaurant serving Mexican food in Mexico (this is good thing), but they kept the intensely ‘Oriental’ decoration anyhow (reverse ethnic-ization?), and when you finally return to the apartment you find a freshly cut potato lying on the table. Not a whole potato, just a sliver cross-section. The apartment had had no food or knives in it. One of the girls must have done it but you have no idea which one, or why. Had she been carrying the potato all night? I ask B. to tell us a ghost story and she says “i have one but it’s true” and while she’s telling it A. falls asleep but I’m left up, awake (not for long, let’s face it), because the story was truly awful. I had asked for it.
As if to explain the potato slice & many other things, all of them in fact: “se ve cualquier cosa en Mexico” said my friend Symphony the next day, temporarily partially blind, before he stumbled out of the Tepito ceviche stand in search of a bus to take him home. Gender melt. Also, Mexico City is a nice place to get books in Spanish.
but back the schedule.
Tuesday finds me (celebrating my birthday) in Santiago de Chile, where Andy Moor & I will DJ the opening night of the Santiago International Film Festival. (Andy’s a great DJ!).
On Thursday at the same festival, I’ll be joining Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Andy, & T. Griffin, as we perform live music to a new Jem Cohen film, Mexico City By Chance. Jem has re-edited the material from our D.F. debut a few months back; this recent incarnation is looking lovely. There will be a workshop or talk as well, with Jem and some of the other musicians, but I will be flying back to D.F… to fly back to NYC… to fly to France… but more on that next week.
So. If I fall asleep while talking to you, you know not to be offended.
and Guy as incredible modern dancer / performance artist
en Nueva York chida la cumbia ya se baila
Literally minutes after my arrival in Mexico City this spring, we found ourselves in a packed restaurant with fluorescent lighting, and 3 flatscreen TVs all on the same channel. I was eating the best octopus taco I’d ever had. A wrinkled old man walked in, going from table to table carrying an ancient wooded box with ‘Toques’ engraved on it. Scrappy wires attached two metal rods to the box.
He was selling electric shocks. Apparently it’s something you do, sometimes, often when drunk: friends buy a ‘touch’ , hold hands, and everybody gets mildly electrocuted. About 10 minutes after he left a young woman comes in selling books of poetry. I’ve been plenty of places where someone comes in with their homemade chapbook, but she had ‘real’ books from a publishing house.
While neither vendedor ambulante made any sales (to my knowledge), at that moment I fell in love with D.F. Electric shocks and poetry. There has been no turning back. Out of all the places I have ever been to (many, trust me..) this is the place I’m most looking forward to return to.
So I’m pleased to announce that next Friday, I’ll be back in Mexico for a picnic…. “off- and on-line conversation about property, capital, and content, from the capital of chaos.” In this edition of ‘Theories of Chaos’, the invited speakers are Mariana Delgado of Proyecto Sonidero and myself – we’ll be talking about these issues in relation to our other love, cumbia. Needless to say, I’m super excited.
After the nocturnal picnic, we’ll head over to the Centro Cultural de Espana (this event is also free) where I’ll DJ their roofdeck party.
here’s a quiet, melodically intense old cumbia from Los Wawanco, an international assortment of musicians based in Argentina. 50 Years of Partying! announces their website.
[audio:LOS WAWANCO – VIENEN LAS BRUJAS.MP3]“Come, my sweet love”
[audio:dulce amor.MP3]+
“it’s 4AM in the morning”
[audio:2nda de la chida.MP3]thematic cumbias (from a no-info Tepitos mp3 cd-r) on the occasion of tonite’s Dutty Artz party in Brooklyn. As Geko Jones says: “I’m over the bananas, our sh*t is rainforesty.”
This one should be fun… I can vouch that Matt & I have a bunch of new remixes and exclusive tunes to run, Gex & Lamin always bring it, and Zuzuka is meant to be a firecracker.
Dutty (and cheap- $5, then $8) tropikkkal fun on the edge of Brooklyn, sound enhanced by Grimm’s reggae bassbins.
let the CIA know yr coming by hitting Facebook.
two flavors of brisk.
from Puebla, Mexico –
[audio:GrupoJalado_CumbiaParrandera.mp3]Grupo Jalado – Cumbia Parrandera
and from Nueva York –
[audio:Estrellas_de_la_Kumbia-Camino_a_Colombia.mp3]Estrellas de la Kumbia – Camino a Colombia
travelling back to NYC in a few hours. Time short, typing fast.. I have promises to keep. And kilobytes to go before I sleep..
The Argentine pop theorist in the form of a mashup king, Villa Diamante, has just released Empacho Digital (digital bellyache), a “3-disc mashup album”. Of course it isn’t available on disc – one can only download it. He says:
This is just another one of the tireless efforts of making art out of art, with cultural industries at their height, record companies at their worst moments, and the Web functioning as the maximum tool for informational searches, the freedom of Wi-Fi is already showing its first collateral damages.
Here’s a tune from “disc 2”, Dubsteperismo, Spanish-language vocals atop wubstep.
[audio:02-VillaDiamante-DonaMariavsItalTek.mp3]Villa Diamante – Doña María vs Ital Tek
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Three years before, Dutchman Dick El Demasiado was in Buenos Aires, making edits of old cumbias.
He called this song “Sabado Cultural”, although his album doesn’t mention the band he is obviously chopping up and sampling, Julieta con los Nuñez. As if they didn’t exist. Remix as reinscription, a more complete kind of erasure – but then there are always folks spotting the source samples. Identifying where the sounds came from transforms the sample from an (anonymous) point into a lineage, in process offering us a chance to listen to the old music that got folded into the new (or the new music that got folded into the new, like when Burial sampled recent songs by Christina Aguilera, David Lynch, and Beyonce).
I especially like hiphop album sample-source compilations — for example the (bootleg) collection of all the original tunes used on J Dilla’s Donuts. A unique window into musical transformation. A fascinating form of bibliography… or memory. DJs as weird historians, accidentally finding themselves in that position after years of ‘just’ looking for music. Julieta seems to have been forgotten except for “Viernes Cultural”, whose memory Dick both effaces and extends.
First, the original:
[audio:Julieta_con_los_Nunez_VIERNES_CULTURAL.MP3]Julieta con los Nuñez – Viernes Cultural (also called Cumbia de las Sandalias)
then Dick’s “lunatic” edit (his word not mine), renamed here
[audio:Julieta_con_los_Nunez_VIERNES_CULTURAL-Dick_el_Demasiado-remix.mp3]Julieta con los Nuñez – Viernes Cultural (Dick el Demasaido remix)