The Psy-Fi Recommends Cumbia Albums To Janszoon Thread

[Psy-Fi]

This album is from musician and producer Will Holland (He also compiled the previously mentioned Colombian cumbia compilation) and was recorded in Cali, Colombia with local musicians from the area.

Los Miticos Del Ritmo - Los Miticos del Ritmo (2012)

Covers of Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, Michael Jackson’s ‘Don’t Stop’, The Abyssinians reggae classic ‘Satta Massagana’ and Gildardo Montoya’s ‘Fabiola’ (as featured on Soundway’s ‘The Original Sound of Cumbia’ sit along side original cumbias on this feel good, house party cumbia LP. Recorded in Will’s home studio in Cali, his approach was to produce an album with the aesthetics of 1960s tropical recordings made in Colombia and the Caribbean. Careful attention made to preserve the analogue quality of the recording at every stage.

[Psy-Fi]

Here's an album of instrumental chicha from "Perro Agradecido" (Grateful Dog) based out of the Federal District, Mexico. This is their debut, full-length album which was released in 2014.

Perro Agradecido - Muy Buenos Días, Tardes, Noches (2014)

Muy Buenos Días, Tardes, Noches

[Psy-Fi]

Another favorite Mexican chicha group which I already mentioned in the first post on the first page of this thread. "Sonido Gallo Negro" with a recent live performance...

Sonido Gallo Negro - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

[Psy-Fi]

A new album from "Los Wembler's de Iquitos" of Peru. The five Sanchez brothers are still together, still going strong, and still making great music after 50 years of playing together.

Los Wembler's de Iquitos - Vision del Ayahuasca (2019)

[Psy-Fi]

Ranil y su Conjunto Tropical - Ranil's Jungle Party (1970)

Here's a good one of mostly instrumental tunes from 'Ranil y su Conjunto Tropical' from Peru, led by Raúl Llerena Vásquez. I was on Raúl's email list and used to get updates from him every 2 or 3 weeks with information about music projects he was working on and his charitable work helping impoverished families in his area. The last email I received was from the 'Analog Africa' record label, about a month after I last heard from him, informing me of his death from COVID-19 in April of 2020. Yet another of several cumbia greats we lost last year to the virus.

Here's a nice mention of him in bandcamp from Analog Africa which was written before his passing...

One of the style’s greatest practitioners is Raúl Llerena Vásquez – known to the world as Ranil – a Peruvian singer, bandleader, record-label entrepreneur and larger-than-life personality who swirled the teeming buzz of the Amazonian jungle, the unstoppable rhythms of Colombian and Ecuatorian dance music, and the psychedelic electricity of guitar-driven rock-and-roll into a knock-out, party-starting concoction. It’s cumbia alright, but you’ve never heard cumbia quite like this before.

Ranil’s music came into being far from Lima, the Peruvian capital, where Cuban-style big band and guitar waltzes vied for popular supremacy. On the distant banks of the Amazon, where Ranil spent the early years of his adulthood working as a schoolteacher, the air was full of the criollo waltzes of his youth, carimbó rhythms from nearby Brasil and crackly broadcasts of cumbia from Colombia picked up on transistor radios.

When Ranil returned to Iquitos after several years teaching in small towns, he assembled a group of musicians and prepared to take the city’s nightlife by storm. His unique blend of galloping rhythms and trebly, reverberant guitar was so successful that he was soon able to take his band to Lima to record their first record at MAG studios, where many of Peru’s most successful psych, rock and salsa bands began their recording careers.

Yet Ranil had no intention of entering into the indentured servitude that comes with signing one’s life away to a record company. Instead he established Produccions Llerena – possibly the first record label founded in the Peruvian Amazon – which allowed him to maintain complete control over the release and distribution of his music. His fearsome negotiation skills and his insistence on organising his own tours turned him into one of the central figures of the Amazonian music scene.

Although his records were popular throughout the region, Ranil never sought his fortune in the capital, preferring to remain in his hometown of Iquitos where, in recent decades, he has concentrated his considerable energies on his radio and television stations, and become involved with local civic politics. Yet his legacy has continued to grow among those fortunate enough to track down copies of his legendary – and legendarily difficult to find – LPs.

[Psy-Fi]

Various Artists - Saturno 2000 - La Rebajada de Los Sonideros 1962​-​1983

A recent compilation from the Analog Africa record label. I'm familiar with "Manzanita" and "Grupo Celeste" but everything else on this comp is new to me. This particular style is like Cumbia on Quaaludes (anyone else here remember Quaaludes?)...

It all started in 2010. I had asked Eamon Ore-Giron - aka DJ Lengua - if he would be interested in compiling a Latin project for Analog Africa, and if so, if he had a theme in mind. He replied, "Have you ever heard of Rebajada?" The question mark above my head, together with the wall of China, must have been the only other object visible from out of space because Eamon, probably noticing I got paralysed, continued, "Rebajada in Spanish means "to reduce, lowered". It's basically Mexican sonideros (sound-system operators) slowing down the beat of a Cumbia to create a much more tangible music to dance to. I'll send you a mix I made last year and let me know what you think." And so he did.

That mix was called Rebajada Mota Mix and I began listening to it on a loop. Although I was not immediately hooked it was intriguing from the get-go, and so I kept listening until magic began unfolding. Slowed down music allows you enough time to hear right through it, revealing itself in ways I had rarely experienced before. Everything became more transparent and I was noticing sounds normally only perceptible by bats. A near psychedelic experience. That mysterious mix included a few Ecuadorian songs by Junior y su Equipo - aka Polibio Mayorga (a cult figure in the sonidero scene), a couple of Mexican tunes, one Colombian, and various Peruvian songs, undoubtedly the driving force behind this project.

The sonidero who brought Peruvian and Ecuadorian music to Mexico was the legendary Pablo Perea from Sonido Arco-Iris, and although his fingerprints are all over the compilation Saturno 2000, this selection of songs in rebajada is exclusive to DJ Lengua. With the exception of a few classics from Polibio Mayorga and La Sampuesana – the queen of all rebajadas – most of these songs were probably never performed as such before, let alone released.

So how did rebajada come to be? In a nutshell; Rebajada started with two families of brothers – the Pereas and the Ortegas – who travelled all over Latin America and returned to Mexico with heavy loads of records which they would sell to the various sonideros always on the lookout for new tunes. Colombian beats especially seemed to fit almost perfectly with the Mexican dance steps – but they were just a bit too fast. As a result some sonideros began experimenting with equipment, and Marco Antonio Cedillo of Sonido Imperial created a revolutionary pitching system that could slow records down to an extent other players could only dream about. And so rebajada was born... or so we thought.

At the same time in north of the country, in Monterrey, sonidero Gabriel Dueñez almost got electrocuted by a short circuit that nearly set his record player on fire. As a result the platter started spinning in slow motion for the rest of the party, turning Cumbia into a different affair altogether. The youngsters went crazy for it and started harassing the sonidero with requests to record cassettes for them. Reluctant at first, Dueñez finally began recording a series of pirated cassettes called "Rebajada" which included mainly Colombian cumbia and porro in slow-mo exclusively. Those tapes took the city by storm and turned rebajada into a celebrated and defiant movement of the youth.

Of course it would not be a Mexican urban legend if it didn't include dramaturgical elements, and so for nearly 30 years, until this day and probably for ever, both cities have been arguing and claiming ownership the creation of rebajada for themselves. But sonidera Joyce Musicolor, who never has time for such trivial arguments, got straight to the point: "Rebajada, and the equipment to perform it, is from here [Mexico City] but it was Monterrey that popularised it."

[Frownland]

[Psy-Fi]

Another recent compilation of Peruvian cumbia released by the Analog Africa label...

Various Artists - Perú Selv​á​tico - Sonic Expedition into the Peruvian Amazon 1972​-​1986

Less than a hundred miles inland from the capital city of Lima lies the great Peruvian jungle, an untamed land of impenetrable forests and endless winding rivers. In its isolated cities, cut off from the fashions of the capital, a unique style of music began to develop, inspired equally by the sounds of the surrounding forests, the roll of the mighty Amazon and Ucayali Rivers, and the rhythms of cumbia picked up from distant stations on transistor radios. With the arrival of electricity, a new generation of young musicians started plugging in their guitars and trading in their accordions for synthesizers: Amazonian cumbia was born.

Powered by fast-paced timbale rhythms, driven by spidery, treble-damaged guitar lines, and drenched in bright splashes of organ, Amazonian cumbia was like a hyperactive distant cousin of surf music crossed with an all-night dance party in the heart of the forest. While many of the genre’s greatest tracks were instrumental, and others were simple celebrations of life in the jungle, the goal of every song was to keep the party going.

Radio stations in Lima remained unaware of the new electric sounds emanating from the jungle, but a handful of pioneering record producers ventured over the mountain passes to the cities of Tarapoto, Moyobamba, Pucallpa – even Iquitos, a city reachable only by boat or plane – and lured dozens of bands to the recording studios of the capital to lay down their best tracks. Although many became local hits, few were ever heard outside the Amazonian region... until now.

With eighteen tracks from some of the greatest names in Amazonian cumbia, Perú Selvatico is both the improbable soundtrack to a beach party on a banks of the Amazon and a psychedelic safari into the sylvan mysteries of the Peruvian jungle.