Carnival in Barranquilla / Meeting Vincent

Late last year Lulacruza, an Argentinean/Colombian musical duo, and Vincent Moon, a renowned French filmmaker, hatched a plan to travel throughout Colombia creating a modern version of field recordings, which in their own words would be “a traveling visual album that lies in between music and cinema… a project that documents a series of travels through Colombia to explore its musical diversity.” All they needed was some money to finance the trip. Well, one successful kickstarter campaign later and they’re ready to go. You will be able to keep up-to-date with their travels every week here on Sounds and Colours where we’ll be having regular updates. Here’s Luis from Lulacruza to start the ball rolling:

After almost a year of dreaming and planning the project over the internet, I (Luis) finally met up with Vincent in person in Barranquilla for Carnival. Breathing in the festive air of what seems to me to be the time of biggest celebration across this beautiful continent.

There are too many things to talk about with Vincent, its almost as if the time will never be enough, but quickly we go over what the journey will be, I take the time to really paint a picture of where we will be going, a list of places spread across the country, with difficult access and very different from each other. From the elevated and spiritually intense Sierra Nevada, to the flavor-full afro-colombian Palenque de San Basilio. An incredible exchange of ideas, more than what we can really hold on to, but inspiring and exciting.

In Barranquilla we met up with one of our collaborators, Lucas Silva from Palenque Records, with whom we will be traveling to Palenque in late April. Along with his friends Sydney Reyes (an expert of Caribbean afro-colombian music and culture) and Fabian (an awesome african and afro-latin music record collector), we went to a picó: an enormous sound system block party in a poor area of Barranquilla. Lucas started filming the scene for a project he is working on his own.

I was happy amongst the beautiful people all dancing to an african-sounding musical style born in Palenque called Champeta.

Here are some pictures of the afternoon and a video of one of my favorite champeta artists, Luis Tower

Luis

You can also read Lulacruza’s blog at blog.lulacruza.com

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