retroViSOR – Chicha! (2014, Colombia)
Our next spotlight is on number 467 on The List, submitted by Cyrus.
On the surface, this is a really beautiful morning listen, with a mix of electronic music touching on jazz, lounge, rock, cumbia, and porro. I particularly love the last few more ambient/experimental tracks on the album, complete with some church bells, bird calls, and train noises, with the penultimate “Manguaré” being my favourite.
Digging deeper though, retroViSOR was a multimedia project formed in 2004 whose use of images and video was just as important as the music, all of it merged together to both celebrate Colombian history and music and raise awareness about the issues the Colombian people and land were(/are) experiencing. And so, there’s a lot more going on in this album than I initially gathered.
I can’t find any info in English so apologies if I get anything wrong by summarizing stuff I’ve read in translation,[1] but I believe this project was headed by Carmen Gil Vrolijk – a university professor who focuses on video art, videomapping, and multimedia – and musician/composer Camilo Giraldo Angel. Apparently seeing retroVISOR live was the ideal way to experience their music, as it was an immersive, somewhat psychedelic experience with various projected images and video mapping that would take you on a journey through Colombia. And, I’m not sure if these are band members themselves, but it seems that their live act included people wearing various animal heads (hippo, zebra, lion, etc.), just like the cover of this album.
And while, just reading that, it sounds like purely a lovely, trippy time, Chicha! addresses issues in Colombian society such as corrupt politicians/corporations and fighting for food sovereignty. The live performance of “Manguaré”, for example, was accompanied with images sourced from Greenpeace showing the destruction of Colombian ecosystems (including the Amazon rainforest) due to the greed of large corporations.
It seems the project is now defunct with this album being their last, so giving this (and their other two releases – Amazonas S.O.S. [2007] and the DVD VJ Sessions [2010] – if you can find them) a spin is the best we can do now to experience this intriguing project.
I’m primarily leaning on a translation of this blog post, which is someone recounting ending up at a performance that turned out to be the release presentation for this album, and then digging into the band because they loved what they saw. ↩︎#Colombia #ColombianMusic #cumbia #electronicMusic #ListenToThis #music #musicDiscovery #porro #retroViSOR #rock
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