Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta Join New York’s Best Psychedelic Tropicalia Bill this August 31

New York’s best psychedelic cumbia show of the year so far is happening this August 31 at the Bell House at 10 PM, where Chicago’s Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta and Austin’s Money Chicha are playing a twinbill. Advance tix are a ridiculously good $12 and still available at the venue as of today. It’s not clear who’s playing first, but that doesn’t matter because both bands are reputedly amazing live.

Money Chicha’s wildly trippy debut album got a feverish thumbs-up here recently. Dos Santos’ latest album, Fonografic –  streaming at Spotify – is a party in a box.  The opening cut, playfully titled Epilogue, begins as a boomy, dub-inflected, staggered waltz fueled by woozy low-register wah guitar, then the twangy chicha melody comes in and gets spun through a funhouse mirror of effects. All of a sudden, Alex Chavez’s blippy organ hits a brisk, minor-key cumbia shuffle!

The tropicalia funk of El Puerto de Animas echoes their tourmates’ heavy cumbia sound, Daniel Villarreal-Carrillo’s drums and Jaime Garza’s bass building to a dizzying, polyrhythmic slink, the twin wah guitars of Chavez and Nathan Karagianis echoing in the mix, Peter Vale’s congas anchoring the otherworldly groove. By contrast, Cafeteando! puts a brass-spiced update on vampy, salsa-influenced late 60s/early 70s jungle cumbia, in the same vein as Juaneco Y Su Combo.

The bittersweet exchange of wah-wah and guitar clang in Santa Clara will remind chicha purists of Los Destellos at their most expansive, classic early 70s best, with a long jaunty trombone solo that takes the song into psychedelic salsa territory. Then the ominously galloping Camino Infernal/Phantom Weight mashes up spaghetti western, surf rock, chicha and Led Zep. 

The band save the best and most straightforward chicha track, Red, for last. Built around a gleefully creepy organ riff, it could be a vintage Los Mirlos number, at least until the band make psychedelic Chicano Batman soul out of it. If a wild, brain-altering dance party is your thing, get your ass to the Bell House on the last day of the month.

Austin’s Best Band Comes to Brooklyn’s Best Venue This Saturday Night

Is Money Chicha’s album Echo en Mexico the heaviest cumbia ever made? Decide for yourself – it’s streaming at Soundcloud.  Just listen, for example, to the string-torturing axe-murderer guitar solo at the end of their version of Juaneco Y Su Combo’s classic, wordless elegy for a plane crash,  Lamento En La Selva, which opens the album. If psychedelic music, the magically trebly, trippy sounds of 1970s Peru, or the idea of dancing your ass off are your thing, get that ass down to Barbes this Saturday night, July 30 at 10 PM where this Austin band – a Grupo Fantasma spinoff – are headlining. A near-capacity crowd crammed into the place last night to see Locobeach – another spinoff of a famous band, in this case cumbia icons Chicha Libre – and they were playing mostly covers. So you’d better get there early.

What’s coolest about this band is how they cycle through just about every kind of psychedelic cumbia ever made: the brisk vamps of Juaneco’s cumbia selvetica; the allusive menace of Lima bands like Los Mirlos; the eclectic sparkle of Los Destellos and the outside-the-box surrealism of Chicha Libre, probably the band they ultimately resemble the most.

The album’s  second track, Level One Sound’s Quieren Efectos, has everything you could want from a classic cumbia jam: catchy minor-key tune, woozy wah guitar, a slinky groove, bright rat-tail organ riffs, trippy dub echoes and a suspenseful timbale beat that threatens to break completely loose but never does.

The title cut shuffles along briskly toward the graveyard, awash in reverb, haunted roller-rink organ and evil flangey guitar. The majestic, metallic guitar solo midway through reminds that the core of this band also play in Black Sabbath reinventors Brownout. Then they completely flip the script with the playful, cartoonish Animalitos: tiny elephants made from sweet crunchy dough = gourmet stoner munchies, no?

Cosa Verde, built around a simple, emphatic riff, looks back to the harder-rocking, classic Lima bands of the late 60s and early 70s like Los Diablo Rojos: the warpy tremoloing guitars really nail that era’s tinny studio sonics, beefed up with fat current-era low end and an unexpectedly dark bridge.

Cumbia Familiar is a very thinly disguised remake of a famous island tv theme first surfed out by the Ventures; this one has all kinds of spacy dub touches wafting through the mix. The album’s best track, Chicha Negra is also is darkest, simmering and swooshing with evil chromatics, serpentine organ and warptone guitar. Its mirror image is the Chicha Libre classic Papageno Electrico, a picture that completes itself when the organ joins the guitar duel at the end.

Yo No Soy Turku is a mashup of the blippy Mediterranean psychedelia of bands like Annabouboula and the macabre Turkish surf rock of Beninghove’s Hangmen. Likewise, the tricky, constantly shifting metrics and horror movie organ of 3 Balls continue the sinister tangent through a strange, dubby outro.

Cumbia Del Tamborcito is the album’s most dubwise and epic track, veering from a staggering intro, back and forth through gritty guitar-fueled intensity and lushly enveloping, nebulously smoky sonics. The final cut is La Cordillera, a deliciously doomy flamenco-metal song in cumbia disguise. Is the coolest album of the last several months or what?

La Yegros Play a Wickedly Fun Cumbia Dance Party in Their Lincoln Center Debut

In their Lincoln Center debut Tuesday night, La Yegros bounced their way through just about every delicious flavor of cumbia on the planet. There have been some pretty awesome dance parties in the atrium space here this year, but this one seemed to have even more bodies than usual out on the floor. No surprise, considering that bandleader Mariana Yegros led the group through slinky, misterioso Lima cumbia, jauntily strutting, hypnotic cumbia selvetica, and rustic Colombian coast gangsta cumbia, with a touch of reggaeton and a little funk. Drummer Gabriel Ostertag and accordionist Nicolás de Luca opened a couple of numbers with spiraling wood flute duets over the trippy sonic morass spilling from the mixing desk along with the bass (this group doesn’t seem to bring a bassist with them when they tour the US). Meanwhile, Yegros twirled and pounced across the stage, building a fiery celebration of alegria (i.e. fun, and the title to the evening’s catchiest, most anthemic singalong).

That was the message throughout the night. Yegros introduced song after song as “being very important to us,” since the group’s irrepressible grooves first spread over the airwaves. from the native Argentina, to Uruguay and then points further north. Americans may be spoiled by instant internet gratification, but the reality is that only forty percent of the world is fully online. In the case of La Yegros, it’s heartwarming to know that a band this good can actually get commercial radio airplay at all.

Guitarist David Martinez opened the first number with an ominous, Lynchian, reverbtoned twang, later reverting to the same kind of distant minor-key allure on the group’s biggest hit, the shadowy Viene de Mi. The quartet surprised and then energized the crowd with a thumping, clattering, jungly drum-and-vocal interlude midway through their roughly hourlong set, then a little later mashed up elements of both Middle Eastern habibi dance music and bhangra in the night’s most ambitious number. Entreated back for an encore when it didn’t seem that the group were going to do one, they treated the crowd to a second take of their hit Chicha Roja, Martinez adding some bluesy metal flourishes as if to say, “I can play that rock stuff in my sleep,” de Luca firing off incisive minor-key riffage and Ostertag anchoring the song with a hypnotically thumping, circling groove while Yegros lept and spun and kept the dancers on their feet. New York’s own Chicha Libre – who pretty much singlehandedly spearheaded the psychedelic cumbia revolution on this continent – may be mothballed at this point, but this was a good substitute. And Lincoln Center impresario Meera Dugal made sure there was some Chicha Libre in a pretty rad global dance mix pulsing from the PA before the show.

The atrium space at Lincoln Center has lots of enticing shows coming up, some of them more dance-oriented, some more low-key. On Dec 1 at 7:30 PM, saxophonist David Murray leads his band performing latinized versions of Nat King Cole classics – an unlikely concept, in fact so unlikely that it could actually be pretty amazing. Then on Dec 8 Lakecia Benjamin, who’s best known as a powerhouse alto saxophonist, but also writes very cool oldschool JB’s-style funk and retro soul songs, brings her eclectic band to the space. And possibly the most eclectic of all the upcoming bandleaders here, cellist/singer Marika Hughes, brings her kinetic blend of jazz, funk, chamber pop and art-rock with her group Bottom Heavy on the 15th.

MAKU Soundsystem Bring Their Darkly Delirious Global Sounds Back to Lincoln Center

The secret to MAKU Soundsystem‘s latest album, the aptly titled Mezcla – streaming at Spotify – is Felipe Quiroz’s  tremoloing, funereal organ. There are thousands of bubbly, terminally cheery, dancey acts out there aping sub-equatorial sounds from both hemispheres. But MAKU Soundsystem have an element of danger, and a ubiquitous if understated populist political sensibility. For example, with the album’s opening track, Agua, the band takes a generic soukous guitar riff and layers suspenseful horn swells and slinky, creepy psychedelic rock organ over a scrambling beat. The point of frontwoman Liliana Conde’s lyrics is that water goes wherever it can, and that our own quest for global unity ought to be just as fluid, and, ultimately, successful. The group are bringing their conscious dance party to the Lincoln Center Atrium on Sept 22 at 7:30 PM, and judging from the crowds they’ve brought to Lincoln Center in the past, you should get there early if you’re going.

The album’s second cut, Thank You Thank You isn’t your ordinary psychedelic cumbia. As it clatters along, the band blend elements of Afrobeat, soukous and ancient African call-and-response into the psychedelic swirl. Let It Go is even trippier – while Camilo Rodriguez’s guitar runs a terse minor-key cumbia hook, the polyrhythms from the horns and a growing army of percussion build in both channels. There isn’t a mathrock band alive who could have so much fun with an interweave of so many different beats at once.

The tangent that Positivo takes is easier to follow – it’s phantasmagorical, it’s part cumbia, part reggae, part chamame and follows a hypnotic, swaying groove: 11/4 time was never so easy to swing your hips to. Then they straighten it out, with a deliciously incisive, smoky organ solo before the brass takes it up to a mighty peak. La Inevitable – implying that you can’t resist dancing to this stuff – is a lot more hypnotic, Rodriguez’s wah-wah guitar just as much a percussion instrument as the rest of the rattle and thump as the group rises to a fiery Ethiopian-inspired crescendo.

The band follows La Hatiana, the most straight-up psychedelic cumbia here, with the album’s most straight-up Afrobeat number, What Do You Wish For. The best track here is Happy Hour, a phantasmagorical cumbia that’s the missing link between Los Destellos and Antibalas. The album winds up with another stunner, De Barrio, a moody mashup of psychedelic cumbia, dub and a sad neoromantic waltz, pure solace for gutter stargazers. To paraphrase George Clinton, liberation isn’t a trickle-down effect.

Bewitchingly Slinky, Darkly Psychedelic Cumbia from Bareto

For those of us who equate minor keys with excitement and passion rather than sadness, slinky Peruvian psychedelic cumbia band Bareto’s fantastic album El Impredecible is streaming at Spotify. And while they don’t seem to be hitting New York soon, they have a US tour coming up.

Like their northern counterparts Chicha Libre – who are a big reason why cumbia became the world’s default party music – Bareto reference the classic, surfy sounds of the late 60s and 70s while adding their own distinctive, equally psychedelic touches. The album’s opening track, La Voz Del Sinchi has the feel of a Los Destellos classic, but with more of a late 70s feel, lead guitarist Joaquín Mariátegui playing his eerily chromatic chords with a shivery, icy chorus-box tone. The album’s second track, La Pantalla (The Screen) has one of the funniest videos made this century: for anyone who’s come home trashed at 4 AM and clicked through to Univision, or Telemundo, or Venevision, this parody will have you laughing til your face hurts. Lead singer Mauricio Mesones’ deadpan vocal downplays its caustic commentary on moronic south-of-the-border tv. If you think that American networks are retarded, go a little further south. The creepy carnival organ drives it home.

The title track takes a sardonically bouncy detour toward shuffling Veracruz folk, with a lingering psychedelic edge. Likewise, Mariátegui’s No Es Para Mi (It’s Not for Me) has a sunny tropical feel, in this case a wah guitar-fueled shout out to Os Mutantes-style bossa-pop. Then the band completely flips the script with the snaky, deliciously carnivalesque La Negra y el Fantasma (The Girl and the Ghost), also by Mariátegui. The interweave of the spare but resonant reverb guitars – that’s Rolo Gallardo on the other one – along with Miguel Ginocchio’s accordion and funeral organ, over the percussion and drums of Jorge Olazo and Sergio Sarria, is intoxicatingly tasty.

The southwestern gothic dub-flavored Bombo Baile takes awhile to get going, then the guitar starts shooting off sparks, a surreal, mind-warping mashup of vintage C&W and Los Destellos’ six-string legend Enrique Delgado. Similarly, the ominous, lingering Viejita Guarachera goes in a dub direction, referencing the Specials’ ska-noir classic, Ghost Town over Jorge Giraldo’s classic roots reggae bass.

Mamá Motelo, by Gallardo, pushes the trippy swirl along, its surf guitar multitracks evoking classic Lima chicha acts like Los Mirlos and Los Diablos Rojos. Susana Baca guests on vocals on the uneasily atmospheric El Loco, an extremely unlikely but unexpectedly successful mashup of traditional festejo folk and the Church’s late 80s spacerock. La Semilla (The Seed) has a twinkling, nocturnal Hawaiian vibe, while the album’s closing cut, País de las Maravillas (Miracle Land) has the loping groove and trebly guitar textures of a classic Los Destellos hit. Bands like this just make you want to forget about American rock and head for the mountains and the jungle where chicha was first fermented.

Speaking of psychedelic cumbia, it’s worth sending out a special shout to Consumata Sonidera, who literally stopped traffic at their show uptown at 125th St. and the highway a couple of weeks ago. When they took the little stage at the park on the river, there was hardly anyone there. By the time they left, almost down to the second that the rain started, cars had pulled over along with bike riders and seemingly half the people making their walk home, not expecting to hear anything like this fun, eclectic, trippy low-key set with just guitar, bass, percussion and frontman Bruno Navarro’s diamond-cutting alto sax.

Vox Urbana at Barbes: One of NYC’s Best Shows of the Year

Saturday night at Barbes, Tucson psychedelic cumbia band Vox Urbana played one of the most deliriously fun shows anywhere in New York this year. They sound like Chicha Libre with horns – yeah, that good.

They opened with a slinky, eerily vampy number, the musical equivalent of a red-on-black Sequeiros tableau. The tremoloing funeral parlor organ in tandem with frontman Kiki Castellanos’ watery, vintage chorus-box guitar gave the music both a menace and a retro allure with tight, bright brass overhead. The number after that sounded like a Burning Spear reggae hit from the 70s reinvented as cumbia, morphing cleverly and almost imperceptibly into a bouncy tropical rock groove. Then they went back to a swaying, hip-tugging slink with an enigmatically anthemic number that hit a big peak as the organ grew smokier while the horns traded riffs with Castellanos, the dancers gathered at the front of the room taking his advice to get down and have some fun.

By now the place was packed, and it was hot: “It’s like Tucson up here!” Castellanos said drily. The band responded with another number that paired purposeful, punchy horns against a lurid, organ-fueled backdrop. Considering how psychedelic the band’s music is, it’s amazing how tight they are: throughout the show, solos were short and concise, and the band kept the unstoppable sway going throughout a big percussion break – Saul Perez on congas and Casey Hadland on drums – into the next tune. Their Spanish lyrics turned out to be much the same, entreating the dancers to do their thing, encouraging global unity and late in the set, sending a shout-out to a popular Tucson community activist. The organist switched to accordion for that one.

The night’s best number was an instrumental that mingled hi-de-ho blues and dark dub reggae into a cumbia….or it might have been a minor-key party anthem a little later on, where Castellanos shifted through his pedalboard and switched out the ice for various degrees of heat, finally taking it out with a wild volley of tremolo-picking. Then the band moved toward ska and then back to the tropical rock – and then an eerily bouncing, modal Ethiopian tune!.

And for what it’s worth, this group draws a really goodlooking crowd. As sadly as this neighborhood has been whitewashed over the years, it was encouraging to see pretty much every New York demographic dancing and reveling in the fact that this is still a multicultural city.

Xixa Find Themselves in the Middle of the Year’s Best Lineup of Music on the 16th at Drom

Xixa are a Giant Sand spinoff. Formerly known as Chicha Dust, their name is as coyly entertaining as the psychedelic cumbias they play. But Giant Sand’s Gabriel Sullivan and Brian Lopez don’t just imitate the gloriously trebly sounds of Peru in the 70s, or pretty much anywhere south of the border in this decade: they’ve got an individual, sometimes harder-rocking, very 80s-inspired sound. Their debut vinyl ep Shift and Shadow is streaming at rockpaperscissors and out from Barbes Records.

They’re playing what’s most likely the best multiple-band lineup anywhere in New York this year – who knows, maybe anywhere at Drom on January 16, starting at 7:30 PM for a measly $10. Check out this lineup: Moroccan trance grooves with Samir Langus, psychedelic, surfy, vallenato-influenced art-rock groovemeisters Los Crema Paraiso, the even more psychedelic cumbia/salsa jammers Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta; the magically haunting, soaring all-female Mariachi Flor de Toloache ; Xixa; then the darkly Middle Eastern flavored Nubian sounds of Alsarah & the Nubatones , rustic Haitian/Dominican cumbia/vallenato group Buyepongo and the newschool Ethiopiques-inspired dancefloor intensity of Debo Band sometime in the wee hours around 1 AM. For those in Park Slope, Buyepongo and then Xixa are also at Union Hall on 1/17 at 8 for $10

The ep’s title track welds Lynchian tremolo guitar and slithery minor-key organ to a peppy stadium rock chorus: you can practically see the sea of lighters rising as the sun goes down on Bonaroo or somewhere similar. The cover of the Meat Puppets’ Plateau – famously redone by Nirvana – looks not to grunge but to both the 80s goth-pop of bands like the Damned and Echo & the Bunnymen, as well as Peruvian jungle-rock legends like Juaneco y Su Combo. With its echoey timbale groove and serpentine organ, Cumbia del Platero brings to mind ornately orchestrated late-period Chicha Libre. The final cut, Dead Man slowly winds its way out of the synthy, chorus-box-guitar 80s toward a newschool cumbia slink.

A full-length album is scheduled for later in the year; fans of dusky, distantly ominous, trippy sounds should check this stuff out. And for those new to the genre, chicha is both a Peruvian malt beverage – sort of the Andean equivalent of Olde English or Colt .45 – and a slang adjective that translates roughly as “ghetto.” It’s also a style of psychedelic cumbia that first peaked in popularity in the 70s but was brought to the US by Chicha Libre and…you know the rest.

New York Bands We Take For Granted: The Perennially Fun Chicha Libre

Musicians call it the curse of the residency. In New York, after all, bands typically don’t build a following: you play to your friends. Book yourself into a weekly residency for a month and see everybody come out for the first and last shows…if you’re lucky. Chicha Libre have managed to beat the odds, on a Monday night, of all nights. By all rights, the Brooklyn chicha revivalists would be entitled to weekends at Barbes, considering that the frontman/cuatro player and lead guitarist own the joint. But they graciously let other bands play Fridays and Saturdays and do their weekly residency/live rehearsal on a Monday…which is genius in a way, since it turns a dead night into a crazy party that probably earns the bar just as much as a Saturday.

Chicha Libre get extra props for singlehandedly spearheading the psychedelic cumbia revival: without them, it’s probably safe to say that the wild, trippy sounds of legendary Peruvian bands like Los Destellos, Los Mirlos and Juaneco y Su Combo would never have made it out of Peru. What Chicha Libre does is exactly what those cult acts were doing forty years ago, mashing up Colombian cumbia, British psychedelia and American surf rock into a trebly, trippy, intoxicating, indelibly Peruvian stoner blend. It works just as well as dance music as it does stoner music; that Chicha Libre are recognized as giants of the genre in Peru speaks to how well they’ve assimilated it. “Sorry we’re late,” cuatro player Olivier Conan told the crowd packed into the back room there a couple of Mondays ago, “It’s our only claim to authenticity.” He was being modest.

They opened and closed their first set with the silly stuff: first Flight of the Valkyries reinvented as a droll cumbia, complete with a long, echoey, dubwise intro from Josh Camp’s wah-wah electric accordion. He would go on to reference 70s arenarock schlockmeisters Styx not once but twice – this band can do funny as well as they do trippy and creepy. The last song was a cumbia version of the mid-70s instrumental novelty hit Popcorn, which they ended with a good-natured shout-out to good weed and the corn liquor (sort of the Peruvian equivalent of Olde English) from which the band takes their name. In between they did the surreal, creepy stuff, lots of it, one of the best sets they’ve ever played on their home turf.

The apprehensively Satie-esque 11 Tejones (a tejon is a badger) had echoey, resonant, tersely spaced Vincent Douglas Telecaster licks mingling with Camp’s swirly, funereal organ lines. The trickly shapeshifting Depresion Tropical – third world economics as oncoming storm – kept the uneasy slink going, followed by Papageno Electrico with its irresistible, bittersweetly ominous chorus. For diehard chicha fans, it takes a slinky early 80s style synth tune ten years back in time, when Los Destellos and their compadres were doing it much more organically and psychedelically.

After that the band treated the crowd to a long, trippy take of the Los Mirlos classic Sonido Amazonico, the title track of Chicha Libre’s brilliant 2008 debut album, Camp’s lighthearted salsa organ solo handing off to a long, hallucinatory, sunbaked one from Douglas. From there, they segued into a couple of covers, the second being another Los Mirlos tune, the scampering Muchachita Del Oriente, Douglas’ spaghetti western guitar set against a long, hypnotically crescendoing twin solo from timbalera Karina Colis and an invigorated sub conga player. They wound up the set with a raw, rugged cumbia take of the Clash’s Guns of Brixton and then a similarly edgy, sarcastic original, La Danza Del Millionario.

And a show back in August where Conan was AWOL featured a second lead guitarist firing off lightning-fast flurries of tapping and seriously metal cumbia in his place. Maybe because the guest guitarist was more familiar with iconic chicha material than Chicha Libre’s songs, that set featured a lot more stuff by Los Destellos and Juaneco. You never know what you’r going to get with this crew. And everybody was dancing. Are Chicha Libre the funnest band in New York or what? They’re back at Barbes next Monday, Sept 29 at 9:30 or so and pretty much every other Monday this year: check the Barbes calendar.

Psychedelic Cumbia Legends Juaneco y Su Combo’s Feral First Two Albums Available for the First Time Outside Peru

In 2008, Barbes Records released the first collection of recordings by Juaneco y Su Combo ever issued outside of the strange and hitherto obscure band’s native Peru. Beginning in the late 60s, Juaneco y Su Combo were pioneers of a surreal, viscerally psychedelic blend of surf music, acid rock, Peruvian folk tunes, Colombian grooves and Cuban dances, which became known as chicha. The corn beverage whose name became attached to the music is sort of the Peruvian equivalent of malt liquor: the ghetto intoxicant of choice. Used as an adjective, it connotes exactly that: “ghetto.“ The chicha revolution in Peru mirrored what was happening at the same time with roots reggae in Jamaica or with turbo-folk in the Balkans: electric instruments and American rock influences transforming the local flavors. That, and planeloads of ganja.

Among the scores of amazing bands – Los Destellos, Los Mirlos, Los Wremblers and Los Diablos Rojos, among others –   playing chicha (or “cumbia sicodelica”) during its peak in the 70s, Juaneco y Su Combo were among the strangest and most feral. They dressed in Shipibo Indian costumes – a radical and considerably dangerous look to adopt, considering how brutally persecuted that population had been from the days of the conquistadors through the dictatorship of Juaneco‘s era. With keening Farfisa organ, tinny electric guitars and bass, the band mixed and ripped coastal Afro-Cuban chants, rustic mountain melodies, hypnotic jungle beats and spiky, glimmering, eerily reverberating surf riffage. Now, the Vital Record has made Juaneco y Su Combo’s first 1970 singles and ep, plus their 1972 full-length debut available for the first time ever outside of Peru as an eighteen-track anthology titled The Birth of Jungle Cumbia. These rare sides – remastered from collectible vinyl since the original masters were lost long ago – capture the band at their wildest, before any producer had the chance to tone down their sound.

As with most chicha bands, their songs are mostly instrumental: the band chants a chorus – usually about a girl, or partying, or local mythology – or somebody exclaims, “Tasty!” and that‘s about it. The occasional out-of-tune guitar, crunched chord or missed beat only adds to the raw spontaneity of the music, obviously recorded live and probably without any second takes. The top end of the Farfisa distorts a lot, and you can hear the engineer tweak levels or even the master volume on the fly.

The band’s de facto frontman, lead guitarist Noe Fachin, was a visionary tunesmith, but as a musician he wasn’t always the witch doctor he was reputed to be. If only he’d practiced more, or hadn’t gotten so stoned before he went into the studio for these sessions: one of the reasons Juaneco’s early material sounds so feral is because Fachin’s lead lines can be so unhinged, losing his grip on his incessant, signature hammer-ons and pull-offs, or wandering away from the beat. While he proved capable of playing with a lot more focus, ultimately we’ll never know what he could have become because on May 2, 1977, he and five of his bandmates were killed in the second horrible plane crash to hit their native Puycallpa in six years. Bandleader Juan Wong Popolizio- who wasn’t on that plane – had lost two family members earlier in an even more horrific crash on Christmas Eve, 1971, which in a cruel stroke of irony the band memorializes in one of the more subdued numbers here.

The first dozen tracks are the 1972 album. A vamping clip-clop groove illustrates the story of an Amazonian centaur woman being chased by the devil, who whips her for being promiscuous. Fachin makes primitive fuzzbox rock out of birdsong, then on the next track staggers his catchy minor-key vamps while Juaneco tells a “negra linda” how much fun his cumbia is. The Farfisa echoes Fachin’s lead lines in very close counterpoint for one of the album’s coolest effects on Me Voy Pa’ Trompeteros: “I’m heading up to oil country,” essentially, a shout-out to regional pride.

Bassist Walter Dominguez contributes a bouncy, cheery number about a pretty palm fruit vendor along with a dedication to his daughter Karina that’s part Byrds, part proto-salsa. This band listened very eclectically: there are echoes of the Ventures’ Out of Limits on Perdido en El Espacio and go-go music on Bailando con Juaneco. The bandleader plays roller-rink organ over a scampering cumbia beat on Rosita y Las Avispitas (Rosita and the Hornets), and also contributes the slow, haunting, bolero-tinged vocal number El Forastero (The Stranger), sung passionately by guiro player Wilindoro Cacique.

The material from the 1970 sessions is a lot more interesting, more melodically complex, closer to rock than electrified Peruvian folk or cumbia, and Fachin is on top of his game even if the boomy sonics aren’t up to the level of the album from two years later. The lead guitarist’s deviously matter-of-fact, spiraling solo slowly pans from left to right and back on Sirenita Enamorada (Mermaid in Love) and he adds a dark chromatic edge to his phrasing on Guajira Loretana. Juaneco’s La Incognita is the most Cuban-flavored track here, followed by the aptly spritely La Danza Del Yacuruna (Dance of the Evil Water Spirit).

The final two tracks comprise the band’s first single. Romance Shipibo (the b-side) is darkly psychedelic folk-rock with a clattering Peruvian groove. And while Fachin’s happy-go-lucky shuffle Aguita de Manantay might bring to mind a babbling brook, the tributary in question was actually fetid and disgusting. Since Juaneco lived nearby, this was a band joke. Oh yeah – you can dance to everything here, in fact you’re supposed to.

After the second plane crash, Juaneco regrouped with the remaining members, although their sound changed considerably. The band is still active in Peru, with Cacique still on lead vocals. Where can you hear this amazing stuff online? Ummm…there isn’t much of anything at the album page, but there are a couple of tracks at the publicists’ site.