#3 // JD Twitch

jd twitch

On the north coast of Colombia, amongst the African and Latin rhythms of the Caribbean is Cartanga, home to Disco Fuentes, the first and longest running record label in Colombia. Since 1934, the label has been popularising the distribution of cumbia, but this is only a small part of cumbia’s story and they’re not the only ones to have championed its sound.

JD Twitch’s obsession with the percussive music of Colombia started with the “really bad Latin records” his parents brought back with them from Argentina - “I listened to them as a child, there was something about their rhythms that attracted me”. After hearing a tape a friend sent him from a club in Argentina, where 2000 kids were dancing to old and new types of cumbia, Twitch was hooked on the sound and started digging. Picking up records in Brazil, searching discogs, going beyond the remastered compilations of Soundway Records.

“Cumbia was considered trash by the intelligentsia and the hipsters of the time...a lot of [cumbia] sounds like bad wedding music, but a lot of it is very strange, hypnotic, psychedelic, danceable music”. Now this raw danceable folk music has undergone the Twitch rework treatment on his new EP: Cumbia. His production keeps some of the bold instrumentation of the original rarities, but alters their structure and reimagines them a little faster and lower.

The selection of records on this episode are cumbia both old and new, from the sixties to mid seventies boom to the hybrid clashes like cumbia-step (available from Argentine label ZZK or Cabeza!), plus an exclusive track from a release due later in the year from Twitch.

Posted at 07:28, 22nd February 2011