El Keamo - El Baile de Soraya / Sonidero Funk 7"
Good news for all you tropical 45 fanatics: Talacha and Peace & Rhythm have teamed up to bring you a two-sided underground, experimental neo-cumbia dance floor banger from El Keamo! California-based, first generation Mexican-American multi-media artist and musician Alfredo González-Martínez goes by the name El Keamo and creates a new language for expressing cumbia. Inspired by the white label sonidero “discos piratas” bootlegs of Mexico City, Talacha and Peace & Rhythm have collaborated to reissue the two most DJ-friendly tracks from El Keamo’s self-titled debut LP.
Side A of this hot 7-inch tortilla kicks off with “El Baile de Soraya,” an uptempo dark synth adventure full of contrasts that takes you trance-dancing through the early morning jungle and then transports you up beyond the galaxy into the rave-o-sphere. The track is propelled by a deep 303 synth bass line and shamanistic electro-maracas while the melody comes from the interplay of intertwining sci-fi synth stabs and squiggles that build and pulse like a message from beyond.
“Sonidero Funk” on the flip brings you back to earth with a reimagined lowrider kumbia that bounces with heavy electro percussion, feinting and jabbing with synth stabs, rolling along like a chopped, hydraulic four-wheeled sound beast down the boulevard, full street style in effect. Soundtrack to an endless summer in the sweltering city, mellow kickback and the opened cerveza in the shade under the palms, looking for a breeze. Blingy hip hop strut meets underground tropical acid house in an East LA video game.
Alfredo González-Martínez started El Keamo as a project in 2019. The idea came while listening to a cumbia playlist at a family gathering. In listening to these all so familiar songs, Alfredo wondered whether anyone had ever abstracted the sound in the same way that some of the electronic music that interests him had deconstructed and bent dance music conventions in new sonic ways. From the start, Alfredo says, he “wanted to approach the project strictly from the lens of the modern landscape of electronic music while retaining the essence of cumbia. It’s not enough to simply play that familiar guiro pattern over a house rhythm and call it a day, there’s a whole relationship and rhythmic quality that needs to be deconstructed and reassembled to create something that feels new yet familiar. Since the onset, I’ve tried to cast as wide a net as possible. I’m always searching for what I can bend next in the ‘formula’ we all understand as cumbia as opposed to finding a particular style and sticking to it.”
Music producer, DJ, designer and record label owner Talacha (Diego Gutiérrez) discovered El Keamo via Instagram, being introduced to his music in 2020 through DJ Daferwa. “I am most grateful to Alfredo for taking the gamble and being my first independent release after I put out eight Kumbia Obscura records,” says Talacha. “Since 2020 we’ve played in CDMX and Tokyo, and I’ve released three projects with him: Escalofrios, El Tocayo, and the El Keamo LP.” As Talacha sees it, El Keamo’s music is the most exciting contemporary take on cumbia because “he pushes it to places it has never been before.” Between the storytelling quality of his compositions, tasteful use of space, and carefully polished synth sounds that are mixed with organic ‘traditional’ cumbia textures, Talacha feels El Keamo “is elevating the genre to a level that feels like a museum performance executed with rave-like euphoria in the middle of a sonidero mosh-pit!” Peace & Rhythm feels the same way about El Keamo’s music, so when they proposed a joint release 7-inch 45 project for a reissue of the two top dancefloor jams from El Keamo’s album, it was the perfect match; and the rest, as they say, is historia.
