mudd up!

[setting up at Norte Sonoro, Casa de las Culturas, San Pedro, Monterrey MX]

Gracias MTY, Gracias Nrmal,

Gracias Artesanía de Colombia in downtown Monterrey, where I picked up this music yesterday – they got the good stuff (dir. Reforma no. 541 Pte. entre Cuauhtemoc y Pino Suarez).

For the record, Mexicans make the best cumbias colombianas.

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Cumbia de Monterrey

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Cumbia Terre

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El Retorno de la Chida

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Bailando la Cumbia

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Problema Matrimonial

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Jorge Meza – Asi Se Baila La Cumbia

[DJ Rupture y Los Enlace Vallenato at Nrmal's NorteSonoro, Monterrey]

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Mama Cumbia

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La Revoltosa

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El Tamborsito 2009

[Pablo Lescano]

A brand new tune from Damas Gratis arrived in my inbox direct from Pablo Lescano last week. And it’s awesome.

“La 3ra del Borracho”, a thematic appetizer for their upcoming album Esquivando El Exito, is a song about appetite and excess (“but I only had five glasses of red!”), institutionalization’s passivity vs. the self-guiding twitch of compulsion. Classic accordeon and horn lines sort their way around catchy, acidic keytar melodies, all chorused up with a reggaetonesque appeal to pa’tras pa’tras as the narrator escapes from the doctor to end up with a piba on the dancefloor, grinding against the wall.

I also appreciate the way Lescano flips cumbia’s convention of calling a followup/response song ’2nda’ etc. so that, here, it edges into relapse, repetition…

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Damas Gratis – La 3ra del Borracho

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In other news, the Kumbia Queers just dropped a video, “Celosa,” from their Pablo Lescano-produced album, La Gran Estafa del Tropipunk, which brings in the reggaeton-edge more explicitly. Who cares about your glitz and glamor or your video’s cinematography/after effects budget/set design; the Kumbia Queers are awesome: radical and inclusive and punk in a way that makes those three tired words mean something again. And that is the big picture uniting both Damas Gratis and Kumbia Queers — they ‘sidestep success’ (esquivar el exito) by ignoring standard ideas about beauty and propriety to successfully create their own worlds, unprecedented before they arrived, now thriving such that the (cumbia) mainstream bends towards them, as it should…

…Or maybe there were no jungle drugs involved, just the standard strong magic of a good cut & paste. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke does his “Lotus Flower” dance to the accompaniment of Peruvian cumbia classic, La Danza de Los Mirlos by Los Mirlos. Letting the private inner reveries out. #cumbia #psicodelica

I am up to my ears in non-blog writing, which means that I haven’t had time to feed the internet with my buzzing thoughts on cumbia; nueva cumbia; Lacanian cumbia trolls; why nobody talks about Super Grupo Colombia even when they come to play a heavily promoted New York City show; the subgenres I keep noticing –  like ‘songs about being drunk in the morning’ and ‘songs about cumbia reaching cities like Philadelphia and Miami’; and much much more. For cumbia is nothing if not generous.

I have a folder containing tribal guarachero tunes that sample Hossam Ramzy and I have another one with the tribal remix + cumbia original done up as nice little pairs, and I will share these things, but before we get to that, we need to do our homework.

CUMBIA EN MONTERREY.   

This 2002 article, Cumbia Sobre El Rio: Celso Piña exports Monterrey’s new Cumbia Dub , goes deep. Required reading.

Here’s a high quality gift — a ‘Monterrey cumbia’ with a guy singing in English about the black man playing his drum. Songs like this were made for me. “The black man plays his drum and the women begin to shout / I want to dance la cumbia de Monterrey”

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Parranderos – Cumbia Monterrey

Los Reyes Vallenatos run things in Monterrey. This band played at the ArcoIris tribal party I covered in the Fader article (Erick Rincon pointed out that most of the bandmembers were in their teens!). Pablo Lescano and Damas Gratis have recorded with them as well. This cumbia gets a lot creepier if you live, like I do, a few blocks away from bars where these dollar dances happen.  

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Los Reyes Vallenatos – La Cosita

and the man himself, Celso Piña — given the slo-mo scraper remix, sonidero melt, CUMBIA POWER. Can’t turn it off!

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Celso Pina – Cumbia Poder (rebajada con guaracha)

Cumbia fans listen up! Diego Ibáñez (aka Sonido Desconocido II) is finishing an epic, informative radio series dedicated to Cumbia history. It broadcasts Friday nights on Mexico City’s UNAM radio, and is available as podcast/stream… Lots of information: songs, a breathy female narrator (very cumbia), interviews… In total, a whopping 22 hours of cumbia infosharing!

En Español, claro, pero the musical selection alone offers breadth and depth (and accurate playlists). Your personal cumbia canon will be expanded! I’m particularly excited by episode 10, on Andean cumbia. The breathy lady begins: “I am cumbia andina mexicana, I’m saya, I’m huayno… I’m Peruvian, Ecuatorian, Chilean… I’m synthesizer, mandolin, and harp, I’m the integration of folklores…”

Introducing the entires series, Diego writes:

Esta serie abordará diversas trayectorias de la cumbia, desde sus inicios en el continente Americano, el proceso en que empezaron a implementarse instrumentos electrónicos en dicha música, desde guitarra eléctrica y órganos melódicos de los 50´s – 60´s hasta el uso de sintetizadores y procesos digitales del presente, trazando cronologías con relaciones geográficas y describiendo algunos de los sucesos que revolucionaron este género y sus diversos subgéneros.

This series will trace various cumbia pathways, from its South American origins, the process by which it embraced electronic instruments – from electric guitar and organs of the 50s & 60s to the current use of synths and digital FX, mapping timelines to geographies and describing some of the events that revolutionized la cumbia and its many subgenres. (“translation” mine)

some links/leaks, some mp3s, some youtubery from Finland.

Art of the leak. Hua Hsu connects Big Boi downloads to US military seacrests escaping via Lady Gaga CD drag. Information value related to the chains surrounding it.

A different type of Cage – BP paying academics for their silence. Gag rules.

Post-payola: in this provocative interview, Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman “divulges a possible shady major label practice of buying iTunes singles with label money in order to hype music up the charts, among other things.”

Binyavanga Wainaina strikes again: How To Write About Africa II, wherein we learn that his original piece first entered in the world as an email rant. Gotta love Binyavanga! I feel sorry for those who haven’t seen Bidoun in its physical form, that magazine-journal-artwork looks good, even if sometimes you have no idea what’s going on.

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Here is a song. A slowed-down cumbia rebajada. The most popular version of this is by Super Grupo Colombia — and, frankly, it annoys me. Here Super Combo Dinamico space things out. Their syrupy screw version pulls new details out from the molasses accordion morass. Todo un exito! Unlike Big Mister President Hugo Chavez, the vocalist dedicates his song to Venezuela and Colombia:

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Super Grupo Dinamico – La Cumbia del Cuervo

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Here is a song. A summer dance HIT from Ghana’s Appietus that’ll be released next week on Akwaaba. Is this a leak? Is this viral marketing? Is broke the new black? What might that mean for us current blacks?

As you contemplate these questions, please consider buying me a book from the Mudd Up! Amazon wishlist. I deserve to be rewarded… for something, surely.

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Appietus – Miss Doctor feat. 4×4

“She just wanna wanna commit a crime.” The mp3′s metadata says: “Copy this song, burn it, pass it around, give your mom a copy, and while we’re at, consider buying it [release date: July 27] if you really enjoy it! Appietus put a lot of work into it.” What DO we pay for?

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LAST BUT NOT LEAST, I just became the 3,975,087th person to watch the following video. Late is better than the new never, which is always. Sample source for the Erick Rincon sublime tuba-enhanced tribal guarachero makeover I posted last week.

After yesterday’s cumbias rebajadas, the regular stuff seems fast. First off, a stunning 14-minute cumbia colombiana medley from Mexico’s Tropa Colombiana. Lots of classics in here, heavy on the accordion. Fluid and entrancing, “como si estuvieramos en Colombia!” (“like we were in Colombia!”):

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Tropa Colombiana – Cumbia Exagonal

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An interview in Spanish which I can’t quite remember doing. But it seems to have happened. Aqui tienen una entrevista conmigo en espanol. No recuerdo haciendola, pero bueno, ya esta: “No hago distinción entre música popular y música experimental”: DJ Rupture* Por Oscar Adad.

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Narcocorridos. Much has been said. But listening? It’s a narrative phenomenon. Meaning stories. Meaning if you can’t understand the lyrics you won’t be getting much critical information from the songs. Take this tune for example. I don’t particularly like this style of music. Yet the lyrics are totally crazy, meticulously descriptive when compared to, say, crack rap. Cumbia is vibe music, many times the lyrics are versions from decades past; Narcocorridos are narrative, dense, detailed short stories set to the tune of cheesy cowboy polkas. It’s intense. Lyric translations in the comment section would be very welcome!

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Exterminador – Amor En Cantidades

Also: a few days ago Lamin saw a couple doing coke on the NYC subway before 9 in the morning. The man made fun of the woman, who had accidentally smudged some power on her nose: “you look like Scarface!”

Everything is happening too quickly. We gotta slow down.

[Turtle at zoo in Czech Republic, wikipedia]

I hit the cumbia rebajada motherlode in MX. slow & low, downpitched sublime. Cumbias rebajadas are slowed down cumbias that you can buy on the street in the right towns. Time gone viscous. Here’s a dark one, really stellar this. I twittered it yesterday:

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Parranderos de Colombia – Cumbia Serrana (rebajada)

and here’s a deep one.. about Arizona:

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Super Grupo Colombia – Cumbia Arizona (rebajada)

I can’t believe it’s July already. This is shocking. Everything is happening too quickly. I’m gonna go for a walk outside and when I come back it’s going to be 2015. Wait…

Eyebeam Open Studios, this Friday 3-6pm in the Chelsea space. I will present a cumbia research project I’m working on as one of Eyebeam’s resident artists this season. La Congona New Cumbia will culminate in a mixtape CD + bilingual poster, and be documented on our blog of the same name.

So feel free to drop by and see/say what’s up. A very diverse group of people will be showing their work-in-progress. For example: while I’m doing weird cumbia distribution/circulation mapping & hotwiring bootleg networks, Ted Southern, pictured below, is building honest-to-God astronaut gloves. (the last pair he designed outperformed NASA gloves on NASA’s own tests). Astronaut gloves!

Open Studios continue on Saturday, although I won’t be able to attend.

This party is going to be multiple varieties of bananas. Argentine cumbia villera pioneers Damas Gratis, Colombian duo Bomba Estereo, Mexico’s top soundboy Toy Selectah, and yours truly with special guest vocalist Jahdan Blakkamoore, raising temperatures down in Monterrey Mexico on Saturday May 29th. ¡¡Puro fuego!! also on the bill: Instituto Mexicano del Sonido, Sonidero Nacional, etc….. BOOM.

For those who don’t know about Damas Gratis’ explosive populist power, read up: my 2008 Fader cumbia article involves careening around Buenos Aires w/ Damas Gratis leader Pablo Lescano. One of the songs he played in his S.U.V was The Kumbia Queers cover of Bronco’s “Que No Quede Huella”. Lots of groups version this one, it’s a nu-classic about love, pain, and forgetting.

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Kumbia Queers – Que No Quede Güeya

& the original from norteño band Bronco

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Bronco – Que No Quede Huella

& note the poster’s fine print: children under 5 get in free – amazing!

Bueno pues, nos vemos en Monterrey! Somebody say fire?