Exclusive Download: DJ Riobamba’s “Altiplano Urbano” Mixtape
09 December, 2013
Sara Skolnick, aka DJ Riobamba.
What better way to start your week than with a new mixtape from an expat living in Bogotá, Colombia?
The DJ behind the mix, Riobamba (real name: Sara Skolnick), hails from Boston, Massachusetts, and is well known as one half of the DJ duo Pajaritos. The pair throws a transnational bass party called Picó Picante.
Riobamba is currently living in Colombia under an ethnomusicology research grant from Fulbright-mtvU to investigate digital music culture. She’s also DJing with artists like Cero39 and El Freaky. (Ed. note: Our friends from El Freaky were just featured on Diplo’s show on BBC Radio 1xtra. You can check out the playlist here.)
She is premiering her mixtape, Altiplano Urbano, exclusively with Sounds and Colours, and it has us dancing in our office.
Riobamba tells us the mix contains sonidos mestizos featuring recent iterations of huayno music and sampling reaching throughout the cordillera.
“The mix features dembow with quena (huaynoton), the first appearance of original Riobamba edits and selections reaching as far as hip hop from the island of San Andrés sampling Peruvian Youtube star Wendy Sulca. The mixtape is dedicated movement, displacement and my family ambateña, gente of the diaspora andino,” she says.
She also shares more about what she is researching in Colombia: “My work centers on producing a mixtape and multimedia interview archive that showcases Colombian digital music producers utilizing low-barrier, Internet-powered production tools and distribution networks for new levels of artistic agency and self-representation,” she says. “My blog post on the mtvU website here describes my project in more detail, and all of the interviews are hosted on http://pa-picar.com/. The first edition featured protest hip-hop crew Patadas al Kraneo can be found here.”Stream Altiplano Urbano below, download it here, and follow Riobamba’s (and Pajaritos’) happenings on her website, Tumblr blog, Facebook, and/or Twitter.
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