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12"
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BR 063EP
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"Brooklyn's Chicha Libre have been at the forefront of a global movement to revalorize Chicha - psychedelic cumbia from Peru. Chicha was first popularized outside of Peru by The Roots of Chicha compilation released by Chicha Libre's own Olivier Conan via Barbes Records. Chicha Libre started out as a tribute to Peruvian pioneers but have evolved into one of the world's preeminent tropical psychedelic bands. While they remain true to its Chicha roots, their music has taken a more psychedelic turn, drawing from its members' alternative background. Like its mentors, Chicha Libre uses surf guitar, organ sounds and Latin percussion to play a mixture of borrowed and homegrown sounds, but its music is a freeform reinvention, not an exercise in nostalgia. Synth sounds, treated guitars, French songs, classical music and pop debris from three continents contribute to Chicha Libre's freeform approach to the tropical genre. The cumbia beats that form the basis of the music are both as inherent and as foreign to them as they are to many generations of South American musicians who embraced a style they rarely grew up with."
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2LP
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BR 032LP
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"Cultural phenomena streak through popular consciousness like meteorites. There's a significant, even life-changing, impact made somewhere, but for many it's only a moment that flickers by, soon to be swallowed back into the cosmos. Chicha might have been like that. Instead, a once-obscure music that enjoyed a fanatic embrace in the Peruvian slums of the 1970s has become a full-fledged global occasion -- thanks to the stunning success of a 2007 CD called The Roots of Chicha. The album, released by the Brooklyn-based Barbès Records, was a passionate act of cultural appreciation: a heartstrong effort to turn the world on its ear with something it had never expected to hear. It took listeners back to the late 1960's, when a number of Peruvian guitarists from Lima and the Amazon created a new electric hybrid, which mixed cumbia, surf, Cuban guaracha, rock, Peruvian folklore, and psychedelic touches. This new wave of Peruvian cumbia came to be known as chicha. Scorned by the middle-class and the official tastemakers, chicha remained mostly associated with the slums of Lima, where the ever-growing population of Andean migrants embraced the music and its players as their own."
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