Cosas Raras

‘I, who was born with Videla / I, who was born without power, I, who fought for freedom but could never get it.’ That’s the first line in Piano Bar, Charly García’s first album after Argentina’s last dictatorship finished. Amigxs, you had to be brave to mention the former dictator there. Why this quote? Because one of the first lines in Rolando Bruno y el Grupo Arevalo’s Cosas Raras reads ‘desapariciones en mi pueblo’ [disappearances in my village]. If you, reader, have never set a foot on the Peruvian lands from which Bruno takes the patterns and tones of his guitar or if you’ve never witnessed the contracultural use of keyboards in Argentina, you should know it: many have fought for those sounds to be, as Bruno keenly intuits, the music of a global party. Decades later, we are here to keep the joy. And the fight. Aren’t we lucky?