We are taking over Mexico City this weekend. 3 dates by El Hijo de la Cumbia, including a FREE SUNDAY PARTY with Asian Dub Foundation and Balkan Beat Box.
& a Thursday live film accompaniment by myself and Andy Moor… and maybe a renegade fiesta w/ HDC Andy y yo este viernes… a ver.
for the moment, here’s info on El Hijo’s dates:
Huelepega sound system
My friend Guillaume (Khiasma) received this week an interesting mixtape titled Los Ojos De Dios, Todos Somos Ilegales from a group of Toronto (Canada) who do experimental cumbia remix, Huelepega Sound System!
It’s really experimental stuff. They remix some cumbia rebajadas and slow it down again! They Call it Doombia!
This might not get you on the dancefloor, but it just might get you off the couch. This music starts with chopped and screwed Colombia-via-Mexican cumbia, with beats slowed down to a spooky, unsettling tempo. Live congas and timbales reinforce the rhythms, while droning keyboards and ricocheting vocal samples open up the sound. Everything gets mixed down in extreme dub. Tempos are subdivided and multiplied – folding the grooves inward and outward, messing with your expectations. The flow rambles and lurches, with dissonance buzzing throughout. To paraphrase the motto of Putumayo Records, doombia is “music guaranteed to make you feel stoned”. There are many different tangents in contemporary Latin music, but few explore such dark territory. Huelepega (named after the glue huffers of Monterrey and Caracas) bring an aggressive lack of polish to their sound. But don’t think that the Huelepegistas don’t know how to play – all four have channelled decades of DJing and performing into creating this startling new sound. Their forthcoming CDR “En Los Ojos De Dios, Todos Somos Ilegales” will be released in March 2009 on Toronto’s acclaimed noise label, Inyrdisk. It’s a natural partnership – Huelepega takes its place alongside such Toronto experimentalists as Women In Tragedy and Disguises to build a greater overstanding of just how alternative Latin music can get. Huelepega Sound System is a reflection and abstraction of the many sonic forces at work in the Latin diaspora in North America. Huelepega isn’t the music you heard in the resort on your last vacation, on the contrary, Huelepega is music from the gutter, inspired by the dark places of Latin America that the consulate warned you about. Huelepega is for ‘los desplazados, los olvidados y los desaparecidos’.
Do Ya Think I’m Freaky – Huelepega Sound System
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El Proyecto Sonidero. A blog/organization/blob looking at the sonidero movement as a creative response to “the necessities of a distinct order, one operating as a transnational platform of expression, innovation, mediation, participation, and communication across wide social sectors.”
Good blogroll, too.
El Proyecto Sonidero reconoce la potencia del movimiento sonidero como respuesta creativa a un conjunto de necesidades de distinto orden, que opera como una plataforma transnacional de expresión, innovación, mediación, participación, y comunicación para amplios sectores de la sociedad. Éste es el territorio que explora nuestro trabajo con la comunidad de sonideros, los espacios culturales y los ámbitos académicos y artísticos.
and today en D.F. they’re doing this…
dates & info coming soon. HDC will also be in Europe June/July. He’s still accepting dates for both tours, no te lo pierdas!!!
I was just talking with Benoit about the barrio de Tepito of D.F. (Mexico City). It’s a fairly heavy neighborhood. Also called Barrio Bravo. And one of the best places in the world to find cumbia CDs (10 pesos per CD, or about $0.66 cents given the pesos recent 40% devaluation against the American dollar (which Mexicans in America refer to as the peso). Benoit found some of the material for his recent Cumbia Con Bass mix there a few months ago.
[taken from Barrio de Tepito]
Right after talking to him, I take a look at the free book Self-organisation/counter-economic-strategies, edited by incredible Danish arts collective Superflex. In a nice coincidence, the first essay is on Tepitos! PDF here.
The essay, written by Alfonso Hernández y traducido al ingles por Hugo Hopping, is called “TEPITO: a barrio of artisans in light of global piracy”. Here’s an excerpt:
Previously, rural bandits and urban gangsters fought against the local chief or landowner. They had no ideology of power and they did not aspire to use one. Today, however, modern crime is a punitive involution that seeks to wield power, inciting barbarism and terrorism. There is a resurgence of a modern repressive state that protects only the global mobility of capital, and covers up the geopolitics of criminal markets that continue to impoverish countries and trigger migration – from the countryside to the city and from one country to another.
Any similarity between local suffering and what we are experiencing at a national level is presented as pure coincidence, as the media reinforces the black legend of Tepito. Consequently, we feel the need to reveal why we rebel against those who at all cost want to make of our barrio bravo a social-economic laboratory of delinquency and drug dealing. Just as national sovereignty is disappearing, the modern re-
pressive state gerrymanders both the existing districts and the virtual ubiquity of Tepito, altering the economic equilibrium from within as well as from without.It is hard to believe that piracy impoverishes commerce. Piracy creates controlled financial spaces for those who make their living, by milking the conlict between formal and informal trade and the subsistence economies that surround it, without ever affecting the black market profitability that is financially administered by white-collar executives.
In this pitched battle against the barrio bravo, many of our youth have been corrupted, others have lost their lives, and many more have become prison fodder. Nevertheless, Tepito lives, risking everything, knowing that for a bastard you need a bastard and a half. Even the black sheep is a member of the family and charisma will put an end to the stigma.
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Superflex is on a powerful flex. In addition to helping Palestine apply to enter the Eurovision contest, they also do things like make art… check this recent video: Flooded McDonald’s