Across Colombia, homemade red flags can be seen hanging from facades, each one representing a household in economic crisis, without the means to buy themselves even a basic food shop. The flags may also be taken as a... Read Article
I write from my go-to café in Merida, Mexico. Ki’ Xocolatl has been a refuge since I discovered their music collection, a virtually complete catalog of Putamayo’s compilation CDs from the discovery days of ‘world music’. But, I... Read Article
Jhon Montoya, best known these days by just his surname, has been producing expansive, hyper-detailed electronic-based compositions for the best part of 10 years – we first picked up on him in 2014. His solo music-making began after... Read Article
The Pacific region of Colombia is a unique and complicated place. Its population is predominantly Afro-Colombian, in some parts as much as 90%, and it is thought to be largely made up of descendents of escaped slaves who... Read Article
Canalón de Timbiqui released their latest album, De Mar y Río, last month. As with previous albums, it contains a mixture of traditional songs from the Timbiqui region near Colombia’s Pacific coast where the group hail from, as... Read Article
In 2012, at the Petronio Álvarez festival in Cali, a group of some of the finest musicians and singers from Colombia’s Pacific coast got together for an informal jam, uniting to perform each other’s songs and celebrate their... Read Article
Within the hot and humid Santiago de Cali night, the streets surrounding Petronio Álvarez festival ring out with the sound of people selling traditional aphrodisiac liquors viche, tomaseca and arrechón (translating roughly as ‘horny’), homemade and bottled to... Read Article
The Pacific and wider music community throughout Colombia has been in mourning this week, following the tragic murder of marimba player, Ángel Marino Beltrán, in Timbiquí, Cauca last Sunday evening. Though still under investigation, the killing appears to... Read Article
After dropping his Top 10 Tunes of 2017 and the first part of his Best of 2017 Mixtape, Cal Jader is back to finish the job with the second part of his rundown on the best Latin beats... Read Article
Bogotá, Colombia, an untamed and often less predictable beast of a city. At times, emitting a looming ambience of darker more powerful forces at work. This is one of those times and the all-enchanting forces are of the... Read Article
There can be no doubt that the marimba has emerged as an instrument of note in Latin America, though this can be largely put down to the increased interesting in Afro-Latin music from the Pacific coast of Colombia,... Read Article
Achingly prolific and ever consistent; both would constitute a fair means of describing either Will ‘Quantic’ Holland or Nidia Góngora’s respective works. No surprise then that such plaudits might apply themselves to the joint works of both of... Read Article
