Affective archaeology of an alternative Paraguay: Guitars, tapes, bedrooms, and invention

Bárbara Scarambone is a Brazilian artist, independent researcher, and naturally curious person. Boombop Indica is her Substack music newsletter (written in Portuguese),  organized by season and free of frills, featuring new releases and non-obvious recommendations. Who is Boombop for? For those who live and breathe music and love the feeling of discovering a new band or stumbling upon an album they didn’t even know existed.

During the World Cup she wrote a post about alternative music from Paraguay, featuring her in-house style of poetic writing, original research, and dreamy analysis, and which she has kindly allowed us to reproduce here, thereby offering us a great opportunity to hear some new music from a much ignored country. 

Hi there. On this day without a match, I’m trying not to think about the World Cup, but it’s impossible not to think about Paraguay, a place that usually appears to us as a border, a neighbor, a crossing, a news item, a stereotype, a blank space on the map. Yet every border has a side that sings softly before turning into a road. And it was through that side that this post began to open up: not as a postcard or through a ready-made notion of Latin American music, but through a collection of noises, guitars, tapes, bedrooms, radios, heat, dust, and invention.

Augusto Roa Bastos, one of the country’s greatest writers, used to say that Paraguay is an island surrounded by land. Perhaps that’s why the music from there sounds like someone inventing their own sea. It is a country that speaks two languages ​​at once and blends them into a third, Jopará, and that created an entirely new [musical] genre a century ago, Guarania, just so it could sing more slowly than the world demanded. A country where women weave ñanduti, a type of lace that mimics a spiderweb (the word literally means “spiderweb” in Guaraní), thread by thread, much like someone recording on four tracks.

There is something deeply moving about listening to a country through what it lets slip out. A band from Coronel Oviedo trying to freeze time with 90s-style guitars, unaware that they are repeating the founding gesture of Guarania. Two brothers in Asunción recording homemade psychedelia in the 70s, in a basement, right in the middle of the Stroessner dictatorship, when broadcasters were scared to even play Italo disco on the radio, and long before lo-fi became a recognized language. Surf music made far from the sea, on that very island surrounded by land. Dream pop with a small-town accent, backyard psychedelia, and noise pop that is both tender and loud, the kind that sounds like it was recorded with a heart pressed right up against the amplifier. This edition of Boombop Indica is a small, affective archaeology of alternative Paraguay: listening to what happens when sound becomes a place. The country emerges as a frequency: strange, sweet, electric, underground, the kind that arrives from the side and keeps echoing, like a door discovered in the middle of a wall. Shall we proceed?

Cassette – Como pasa el tiempo (2026)

Where: Coronel Oviedo, Paraguay

For those who enjoy: ethereal-reverbed-nineties guitars, My Bloody Valentine playing on a countryside radio station, the need to stop time knowing that it doesn’t stop for anyone, small-town dream pop, analogue photos fading with care.

The hit: No me busques

JODI – Pop Espontáneo (1972)

Where: Asunción, Paraguay

For fans of: basement-style Mutantes, raw and visionary homemade psychedelia, a Stockhausen student with an 8-track recorder, R. Stevie Moore, clandestine fuzz during a dictatorship, vinyl archaeology, and discovering that lo-fi existed before the name did.

The hit: Loveseller

EEEKS – Pet City (2017)

Where: Asunción, Paraguay

For fans of: 1960s surf music with no sea on the horizon: “the island without a sea”, guitars that start at the beach and end in the dark; a blend of new wave, post-punk, and shoegaze with a dash of grit; Allah-Las after listening to The Cure; dancing while looking at the floor; electric 60s vibes filtered through the 80s; reverb as an act of imagination; the B-side of summer.

The hit: II Novo 60’s

The Crayolas – Being There (2018)

From: Asunción, Paraguay

For fans of: backyard psychedelia with sharp guitars, closing your eyes and seeing a kaleidoscope, hot afternoons slowly melting away, singing in English while dreaming in Guaraní, colors that don’t yet have names, a good-humored Ty Segall, the world seen through coloured glass, and siestas that turn into journeys.

The hit: Sabes

paraguanoise – Tierra del Cerro (2025)

Where: Asunción, Paraguay

For those who like: lo-fi noise pop, El Mató a Un Policía Motorizado, Yo La Tengo, distortion like a hug, love songs recorded in the bedroom, Horsegirl, the blurred border between Asunción and La Plata, being young and eternal with the amplifier on.

The hit: Secuencia

(Here’s a link to the original post on Substack.)

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