August O.C.D. #2: Cumbia Rebajada Music

A random link inside the internets turned me onto cumbia rebajadas a while back, and honestly, I had never really listened to even cumbia music, which is a percussion-heavy latin music popular amongst mainland latinos more than island latinos. Rebajadas came from a DJ in the '60s who's radio ran out of batteries, causing the record to drag, pumping up the bass sounds and warping the vocals but the high end percussion still popped like crazy. Of course, this is the basic DJ Screw music story, except it predates it by about 30 years. Oddly enough, the guy who originally did this to cumbia music is now in his fifties, lives in Houston, and is an air conditioner repairman. He had a flea market stand in Mexico proper where he sold his mixes of slowed down cumbia music, and as far as I know, he still has a stand down there. I'm not sure why, but slowed down music heavy with percussion really speaks to me and I could listen to it forever. In fact, upon finding about cumbia rebajada, I downloaded whatever I could find online (there's two good mixes to be found online: Sonido Martines' Las Rebajadas Van a Brooklin and Dr. Auratheft's El Maldito Accordeon) and drove my wife and kids crazy with it. The fact there's so little of it to be found sucks, because I've played out what I have, but in that time, did break up those two mixes into individual tracks in Audacity to shave off the chaff and keep the wheat. My search for such stuff also led me to an album called The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru, which is pretty goddamned amazing too. Chicha is a hallucinogenic drink popular with with the more indigenously inclined, and this is music made for and by such folks. I don’t think I have to tell you that music with lots of clangy drums and a repetitive-yet-catchy-as-fuck rhythm made by people under the influence of mind-altering substances is usually a good thing, so long as the people aren’t white as fuck. Even then, it often works still.