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A microplaylist for Bandcamp Friday

Sometimes the description is enough to transform one’s status from passive to active.

The paragraphs written by the self-proclaimed “salsapunk” duo Contento, Paulo Olarte and Sebastián Hoyos, about its new song “Pobre Canario” did it for me. The song observes how some people make fun of others just to pump themselves up, suggesting that to flip the energy, a response is to put the “tatequieto” (one translation: smack on the butt) on them.

“This fast song in its rhythm is for us to sing to them and show them the regret they give us for not knowing how to laugh at themselves, such an important characteristic in people. A theme to dance and sing with a burlesque smile.”

I stumbled on the delightfully groovy music of Contento, two Colombians living in Europe, through the Bandcamp page of El Palmas Music, the Barcelona-based label that has done exhaustive research on, among other things, salsa and Afro-Cuban music from Venezuela in the 1970s. That’s where I found Andres y sus Estrellas a few weeks back, and then discovered Color de Tropico, a 3-volume compilation of rare singles from Venezuela in the 1960s and ‘70s. Among the highly danceable curiosities on Volume 3 is “Aquella Noche” from the band Un Dos Tres y….Fuera:

The team at El Palmas has gone deep in Venezuela, unearthing small-press releases from regional salsa-oriented orchestras and boogaloo and surf rock and just about everything in between.

Here’s “Introduccion,” an instrumental blues from Los Supersonicos that was recorded in the early ‘60s and released in 2021:

And then there’s the 1961 debut of Conjunto Ingenieria, a 9-piece orchestra made up of engineering students from Caracas's Universidad Central de Venezuela. These musicians were inspired by the torrid Latin-jazz (Tito Puente, Machito, et. al.) happening in New York in the late ‘50s — the musicians had a friend who brought back records while studying abroad. Perhaps because they were engineers and accustomed to careful analysis, the musicians absorbed the specific architecture of Afro-Cuban rhythms like son montuno, and then added trippy intricacies (note the tempo changes in “La Bola” below). El Palmas did a compilation on Conjunto Ingenieria in 2022, covering material from its three commercially available titles. This week the label brought out a reissue of the self-titled debut. It’s a nice smack on the butt from some impossibly rich distant past…..

Echo Locator focuses on nearly vanished sounds, spirits, musicians and ideas about music. Please send recommendations, joys, concerns etc. to our digital suggestion box: echolocatormusic@gmail.com. Thanks!