El Disco Es Cultura: Circular Flows Migrating North

Raul Llerena, born in Belén, Iquitos, in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest, is something of a luminary in that watery town and a legend in the world of cumbia music. Musician, producer, journalist, television and radio station broadcaster, he was ever only any of those things when he could take charge of his self-presentation. To disseminate his music, he pressed his own records. To get on T.V., he broadcast his own signal. He is currently running for mayor of his town. And, if you’ve never heard of him, another independent vinyl-press project, Masstropicas, is looking to change that.

I had a chance to meet Masstropicas’ head honcho, Michael Pigott, at a curated speaker and performance series in New Haven, “SOUND HALL,” presented by DETRITUS bookstore and CHAMPIONSOUND, and co-sponsored by the Public Humanities Initiative and the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale. Upon discovering that Pigott and I shared a number of cumbia crate-fiend friends and acquaintances, diggers like Supersonido and the tripartite team of Ganas, Enorbito and Lengua at Mas Exitos, I realized how tight the community of presenters and preservers of cumbia music is in the United States. Although Pigott travels regularly into the Amazonian jungle to find records so rare that he may own the only existing copy, his curating project takes place in the North: sometimes requiring that he mend broken 45s lest the recording be lost forever.

His current project takes on a similar mission of communal preservation. Along with Lima Foto Libre, Masstropicas, in conjunction with La Cumbia de Mis Viejos, Chapillacs, and Fokus Limonta, is kickstarting a project to travel up the Ucayali river, through the Peruvian rainforest, to record and document a new cumbia movement, expecting to emerge from the adventure with a 7″ and LP from the recordings. In donating to the project, you reserve your own artifactual vinyl from the jungle.

There is, of course, a more complicated implication for the exportation of jungle sounds to the world stage. In many cases, the cumbia musicians of Peru include a shaman in their band, as if to ward of the devil of wherewithal. Nonetheless, under the spiritual guidance of the genii of jungle rhythms, the spirit of ayahuasca and the funky techniques of modern production, cumbia has transformed to and from chicha, entered the 1980s and transpired to take its place on the world’s stage while remaining resiliently local. The brew having settled, it seems, in their favor.

But, you might be asking, where the sounds? Upon Masstropicas‘ digs, I present the following selection:

For more, you know where to go.