La Locura De Machuca 75-80

Description

One night in 1975, a successful tax lawyer named Rafael Machuca was captivated on the "Plaza de los Musicos" in Barranquilla. Overnight, he went from a high-ranking position within the Colombian tax administration to a visionary guru of production at his new record label, Discos Machuca, and for the next six years, he dedicated his life to releasing some of the strangest and most experimental Afro-psychedelic cumbia albums ever produced. La Locura de Machuca is the story of one man's strange odyssey through the underground music of the Colombian coast and his contribution to bringing wild and hypnotic sounds to light. The Colombian music industry was thriving in the mid-70s, but while local bolero and vallenato tunes sold well, it was primarily imported African records that ignited the picos (the sound systems that fueled neighborhood parties), and wherever these records were played, there were always a few groups looking to integrate traditional cumbia with these electric currents from across the Atlantic. It was these obscure groups, who fused Colombian and African rhythms with the roaring organs and psychedelic guitars of underground rock, that sparked Machuca's imagination. While the label made money releasing popular hits from legends like Alejandro Durán and Aníbal Velásquez, this money was reinvested into a unique series of experimental releases from marginal artists like La Banda Africana, King Somalie, Conjunto Barbacoa, and Abelardo Carbono, one of the founding fathers of champeta criolla. When Machuca couldn't find groups to realize his project, he created them himself. Relying on a formidable roster of musicians associated with the label, he assembled groups that only performed long enough to record an album and released the result under a variety of different names like Samba Negra or El Grupo Folclórico, complete with quite unusual album covers. This unorthodox approach led his long-time sound engineer, Eduardo Dávila, to describe Machuca's productions as the B-movies of Colombian music. The story of Machuca and his eccentric exploits reveals that of one of the most atypical and unique record labels in Colombia, an essential pillar of Afro-Caribbean psychedelia. His productions came to represent the roots of champeta sound and establish the basic criteria of the Afro and costeño avant-garde. The seventeen tracks of La Locura de Machuca, gathered from the darkest and strangest corners of the Discos Machuca catalog, sound like few things recorded before or since. Includes a 32-page booklet. The new compilation from the Analog Africa label featuring 17 tracks from the Colombian label Discos Machuca is available on CD and double vinyl. The latter is sold with a gatefold cover and a 16-page booklet.