LA CONGONA NEW CUMBIA

Peruvian chicha group Los Destellos are (apparently) on tour in America, and it begins in New Haven Connecticut tomorrow night. Weird! They claim to be playing a prObama party on January 10th, with NYC-area gigs planned, but there’s no concrete info yet…

Meanwhile Sonido Martines is playing some crazy NYE party outside Paris with the Extra Action Marching band – his plane had to make an emergency landing in Sao Paolo because something was broken and/or on fire.

traveling from one continent to another always means time out of joint.

Rebajadas/Screw music also mean time out of joint. Here’s an ill Destellos screw, they lean towards swampy country rock when that chord change hits. Powerful! Sluggish!

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Los Destellos – A Patricia (Rebajada a la Congona)

this is from a 7″ in a grimy white sleeve, unlike the colorful psychedelia below.

more translation from Raúl Romero’s Andinos Y Tropicales:

Founded in Lima in 1968 by Enrique Delgado (1949-1996), Los Destellos used two electric guitars, an electric bass, and a drumkit. The congos and bongos would come later, and, in the mid-70s’, a synth…

Delgado, the lead guitarist, mixed straight instrumental cumbias with sung versions. At the song’s beginning he’d play the full melody in his characteristic style: clean, open, with slight reverb. For the final section his guitar would fill the singer’s pauses with riffs and melodic counterpoint…

But Enrique Delgado’s contributions to Peruvian cumbia went beyond playing style. In terms of repertorie, he introduced various regional roots in his songs, anticipating the potpourri of styles which would come to Peruvian cumbia in the following years. While they mainly played a kind of conventional cumbia called ‘cumbia costena’ by its followers, Los Destellos also introduced songs with Andean backdrops, like the huaynos “Valicha” and “Carnaval de Arequipa”, and also tunes steeped in the Amazon imaginary, like “La Charapita”. Given that their repertoire continued developing in the 70s and 80s, they became known to the public as Andean cumbia (“chicha”) and jungle cumbia (“cumbia selvática).

and also

Mixing different traditional rhythms, especially cumbia colombiana, el huayno, rock, and New Wave, Los Destellos quickly connected with young limeños, the children of new Lima immigrants who didn’t feel like country kids or city locals. They identified with the huayno lyrics that their parents had played, but the nostalgia and deep sadness was awkward to them – they preferred the happy cumbias and guarachas, even though their lyrics weren’t saying anything.

-Pablo O’Brien (quoted by Romero)

and youtube of the unscrewed version

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