This eccentric video is the brainchild of Argentine publicists, with music by Gaby Kerpel, also known as King Coya from Buenos Aires.  The talent on the screen is 100% Peru.

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Tablet magazine reported on the overwhelming response this wacky ode to Jerusalem generated, everything from adoring praise to the crudest racist rantings, in English, Spanish, and unintelligible Viking-speak.

The artists sing of their dream of going to dance in Israel, the opening shows people on the street giving their impression of Israel as a sad, dangerous place.  El Delfin exclaims from his living room, “No puede ser!” It can’t be!  “Que bonito es Israel”  is the hook, proclaiming it a land of love and wonder for all Latin Americans to visit.  Little Wendy pleads to be able to visit Israel and La Tigresa just wants to dance with everyone in Israel.

An announcer interjects throughout the song, typical of a Peruvian pop video, he sounds like he’s broadcasting from the pro-wrestling ring.  He invites all Latin America, to “acercate a Israel,” check out Israel, while a mishmash of images float across the scene and La Tigresa claws you with her cosmetic surgery-enhanced prowess.

With kind words from fans in Israel, it’s looking like the Zizek Collective might need to special delivery some cumbia to Tel Aviv.  And bring a side of Peruvian hot sauce.

It’s 2020 and you’re on a jeep in the rainforest, in search of a notorious underground dance party.  You’re pursued by the jungle police, who are cracking down on unreported tropical clubs with jetsetter deejays and the most savage gogo dancers.  But you give them the slip, through an especially dense patch of banana trees and rabid shrubbery.

The Frikstailers make unclassifiable dance tracks blending elements of dubstep, cumbia,  dancehall, hip hop, and house.  They reinterpret and reshape melody out of chopped vocal samples, they graft bells and claps with synth chords as counterpoint to drum and bass.  On Cumbiancha Muyo, scratches with reverberating slow-mo bass lines trick out a cacophony of rap and hype monosyllables.  A cumbia break switches up the rhythm and cultural orientation, then reverts back to the original hip hop beat and ends on an ethereal synth melody hanging in the air; the only thing tying the track together is the hypeman’s ooh and ow on repeat.  It’s a club track, recycled from fluid dance floor debauchery, spliced and synched for a global crowd.  Reconstructing international music moments and lining them up, the Frikstailers combine the best of vastly different corners of the music world in a unified spirit.  Equal parts club banger and video game backing track, Frikstailer cuts are the haunting instrumental soundtrack to your mobile life.

Rafa Caivano and Lisandro Sona met in the middle of Argentina, in Cordoba, at university where they’d both enrolled to study sound engineering.  Rafa is from a small town in the Argentine plains and Lisandro was raised in Jujuy, along the Bolivian border.  They both grew up pilfering club music inspiration online and from throw-away compilations of funk, dancehall, hip hop, and soul.  Lisandro played guitar in a rock band and honed his skills composing on a program called Music 2000, Playstation’s “MTV Music Generator.”  In his farming town of population seven thousand, Rafa somehow discovered Chicago House, developed an outcast raver persona unique to his surroundings, and began producing tracks on Fruity Loops.  In college sound engineer classes, he showed Lisandro the program and some of the tricks he’d developed for dismembering songs and splicing mutant sound bites together.  Within a week of Fruity Loops discovery, Lisandro had adopted Rafa’s stylistic renderings and incorporated his own song writing skills to compose an entire album.  The Frikstailers were born.

Cordoba’s biggest draw is the university and the student culture that comes out of it.  Rafael and Lisandro grew their sound throwing clubs and hosting a radio show.  Their weekly party brings a thousand students to three levels of dancefloor.

In Buenos Aires they met up with some of the artists that form Zizek, a party with Argentina’s hottest DJ talent on rotation.  They played a Zizek night and began collaborating with ZZK Records.  They went on tour with ZZK hitting South By Southwest in 2008 and found a new playground merging cumbia with minimal house and dubstep.  They were highly inspired and writing upwards of 20 tracks a week at the time, playing with genre and style.  At their Zizek debut, they wore costumes and entertained with original props.   The offspring of their signature style is a recent outrageous video.

The Frikstailers EP released on ZZK Records is a preview of an LP to come later this year, accompanied by a European/US tour.

Travel and Arts journalist, Eve Hyman, writes about emerging South American artists from her hub in old Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Lagartijeando

At the crossroads of reggaeton and electronica, Lagartijeando’s cumbia makes a push for Latin desert folk and video game distraction alike.  On his version of “Kalima” the Lizard Kid rips apart Montreal producer heavyweight Ghislain Poirier’s track, reconstructing it with a desert playground sensibility – adding futuristic flash and unconventional sonic boom.

The Kalima remix is a cumbia effort, but Lagartijeando spends a lot of time with folklore too, local folk rhythms from Argentina and other countries of the Andes, where a wide range of drum patterns make a colorful palate for the beat maker.  Neo Bailongo is the producer’s first record as Lagartijeando, out on ZZK Records.

Raised on rhythms of the Argentinian backwoods, Matias Zundel dips his dance tracks in country folk gold where chacareras, huaynos, and vidalas two-step with jungle and electronica.

“Lagartijeando” is the act of being a lizard; slithering tongue, leathery skin, and dragon-like form in a compact package.  Tracks from Neo Bailongo feel like a conversation between contrasting characters, like extraterrestrial ethnicities converging at the club. There isaccordion laced with sonic bleeps and pops, dub beats with organ melody.  There are break downs where the starry desert sky battles the urban skyline.

Shaman chant and charango guitar loops are the backbone of Lagartijeando’s signature style.  Native voices are the backbeat to percussion and bass tracks with organ melodies combining cumbia and psychedelic noise.  Songs give deference to ritual and maintain respect for tradition while pushing the old into a cosmic space future.

Matias takes his cue from the shaman, human vehicle of centuries of wisdom. He song writes about the curative effects of plants, the connection between air and earth, the rhythm of land and sea.  Chants are harmonies that call down the spirits through trance and story.  When he borrows indigenous chant for a sample, he does so with obvious respect for its source.

The producer was raised on an audio diet mixed up with folklorico, cumbia tropical, drum and bass, and rock.  He hails from Dolores, a small town 3 hours from Buenos Aires where indigenous history and cowboy violence has been documented in folklore and gaucho song.  Sound effects blend with accordion and dub samples in a dance fantasy heightened by hallucinogenic plants. Afro-Peruvian call to drum evokes the Amazon, blips and bleeps turn that visual into video game landscape.

Lagartijeando desert landscape

Lagartijeando mines natural South American sounds at their place of origin and concocts his own blend of local sonic spice.  In Dolores where he grew up, a local gaucho would storytell with his guitar for hours by the campfire, then pass out from the effort.  Matias’ childhood was seeped in the rituals of the gauchos, nomadic figures, born of two cultures, accepted by neither.  Artistic curiosity sent him traveling, as he puts it, to find the center of the world.  First he went to Buenos Aires where he discovered electronic music with friends and nights out in the explosive club scene.  But he decided the center could be better found in dramatic natural settings.  (He hasn’t been to New York City!) He left Argentina and went on to Mexico, Peru, Guatemala and Bolivia.  In a mountain oasis he found what the shamans call “the other side of the mirror” and he recorded it, on his mobile studio.

Carnabailito, sayas, and roots cumbia were there in the mirror.  Fantasy and fable to be recorded and shared.  Step onto the Lagartijeando dance floor – desert covered in a storm of stars.  Stay up on future exploits from the Argentine artist who treks both Bolivian jungle and Oaxacan desert bringing new focus to far off inspiration from the gods of sci-fi pan-Latin dance.

This week’s South American City focuses on a fire spitting female. Straight out of Rio, Deize Tigrona brings the intensity, power, and beauty you’d expect from a Brazilian lady emcee with her own raw signature style crafted in the hood and delivered via her Berlin record label.

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She has collaborated with Portugal’s Buraka Som Sistema, with Diplo, MIA and Bonde do Rolê. First time I heard her was on the track below, as the heavy hitting vocalist on Buraka’s “Aqui para Voces” (Here for You). First time I saw her live was in Buenos Aires, playing Man Recordings’ visit to Zizek Club during the Baile Funk versus Cumbia throwdown. Deize is definitely the real Brazil deal coming straight out of the infamous City of God in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s dynamic and dramatic version of NYC.

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Her verbal presence is not to be tested but her delivery comes with the loveliest smile and though you don’t understand the language, Deize manages to get a lot across through her talent as a performer. She tells some of her story on this video made by an Australian film company “visiting the favela” on some dastardly tourism expose.

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Seeing her live was amazing in a town that doesn’t get many raw female vocalists. (Which could be any town, really.) She won the crowd over despite the language barrier with her charisma and impressive flow. She sang a nasty song at one point that seemed to imply c**chie power and it was an instant classic, one for girlfriends to reference long after Deize came to town.

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This next video is a perfect example of dude’s ability to connect to a scene outside his country. There is not as much Argentina in this video as Colombian cartel.  (Except for the girls, they ring pretty true.)

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The characters and Cuban cantina aesthetic are nada que ver with where the artist is from and presently resides. Except for the fact that he spends some time in Florida – that might really be the story. Because there is more Caribbean going on than Southern Cone – but I’d say the same for hip hop so there you go. If you build it they will come? Dante is a one-man Argentine hip hop factory spitting game and bringing heat to fans of reggaeton and cumbia, and likely converting a few new hip hop heads along the way.

What’s the difference between reggaeton and hip hop en español? Like every style of music, it’s the beat that identifies and categorizes. Most of Dante’s tracks are radio ready hip hop, rather than reggaeton. But don’t take my word on it, give a listen.