JUAN DATA : HARD DATA CUMBIA NIGHT!

January 26, 2010 - Posted by dj umb

You know I’ve been doing a great disservice to my homie JUAN DATA from the HARD DATA blog because he’s been writing all this incredible stuff about Cumbia.

Also recently he just gave away a brilliant new Cumbia remix of his and we have not said a word about it until now.

Sorry Juan, I have been reading all the great shit you’ve been writing about and listened to your great new remix, which I love to bits.

Here’s what Don Juan said about his new remix:

AND NOW MY–I MEAN OUR REMIX

I’ve known Cherman for a long time. We were both underground entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires during the second half of the nineties so we crossed paths many times. I often collaborated in his fanzine and for a while we even hosted a radio show together. So when he came up to me with the idea for an Agrupación Mamanis tribute compilation I got very excited. I decided to do a remix of “El Himno Del Cucumelo” myself, but I tried and I failed. So I gave up.

But later, I hooked up with another DJ friend of mine, Dub Snakr, and he has way more experience than me in production, and a lot more studio equipment and we decided to work together in the remix. Unfortunately, along the way his studio computer decided to die with all our files inside and it took a while to fix it, so we were never able to send our remix in time to be included in the compilation.

So I’m offering it for you here. And I hope you like it because it’s our first intent at a cumbia remix and hopefully it won’t be the last one.

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD: “El Himno del Cucumelo” (Fungus Remix) by DJ Juan Data and Dub Snakr

Please also catch up on some really informative, insightful and educational pieces he has been writing, such as the following:

THE CUCUMELO SAGA AND BEYOND (and DJ Juan Data’s first cumbia remix)

Another Unnecessary Intent Of Intellectualizing Neo-Cumbia

ANARKIA TROPIKAL-Kumbia Not Dead (Independent, 2009)

CUMBIA NENAS

PLUS:

I just had to reproduce this hilarious paragraph from his piece “Juan Data’s Wish List For The Next Decade”:

No more DJ’s who can’t mix. Granted, DJing was a little elitist back when it was limited to the people who could afford to buy two turntables, a mixer and lots of records. But those people, for the most part, tried to get their investment money worth by practicing or at least, trying to figure out how to work those things.

Nowadays, laptops and cheap software democratized the access to DJing to virtually everybody and suddenly every other loser out there thinks he/she can rock a party and take the groupies home.

The problem with making DJing so seemingly accessible is that these new wannabes come with the this-is-so-easy-anybody-can-do-it attitude and don’t even worry about learning the very basic mixing techniques. And that drives me nuts especially because most of these new DJ programs already do most of the beat-matching work for you… and they still can’t mix! Go back to the dance-floor where you belong.

PLUS DOWNLOAD A FREE ANARKIA TROPIKAL ALBUM:

Here

This is “KUMBIA” from CHILE and Don Juan said this about it:

Now Chilean cumbia in general, and Chilean neo-cumbia in particular, are a complete mystery to me. Of course I’m familiar with Chilean cumbia hero Chico Trujillo and a few others here and there, and it’s also undeniable the influence of Argentinean cumbia (and cumbia villera) on the other side of the Andes.

We also know about German neo-cumbia pioneer Señor Coconut who made his first experiments with the genre Chile. And we know that Chile has arguably the richest Spanish hip-hop scene in the continent (my favorite MC and my favorite DJ are Chilean: Anita Tijoux and DJ Raff, respectively).

Now if we were to put all those ingredients together in a blender, the result should be a flourishing Chilean neo-cumbia scene comparable to the Argentinean, Mexican or Colombian. But if that in fact exists, I have yet to find it.

So far, I’m happy to find Anarkia Tropikal with their goofy lo-fi rebellious cumbias that remind me at times of Mexico’s El Gran Silencio and Argentina’s Todos Tus Muertos or Bersuit but take it to unexpected extremes indulging into some anxiety-inducing trash-metal and hardcore-techno moments.

There are no cool breaks to sample and no catchy tunes to play at the parties, so my DJ interest in this album is almost inexistent, but it does make me laugh at times when I listen to it (clever moments like “Bachelet rhymes with Pinochet”), especially in the skits.

Ideal as background music to have while reading The Clinic.

So that should be enough to keep you going and if you have not done so already, also check out his Cumbia mixtapes: