Cumbia Beat Vol 2

The garish cover looks like the sort of booty shaking bootleg you might pick up at the massive black market opposite Lima airport. But it's an intriguing nostalgia trip to 1966¬1983, when cumbia in Peru took on a psychedelic mantle and imbibed a musical cocktail of Doors-style keyboards, spooky chimes, moogs, wah-wah, fuzz, drowning fish noises and spiralling guitar solos. The genre is known locally as chicha and some of its most celebrated exponents, including Enrique Delgado, Berardo Trujillo Hernández (aka Manzanita), Los Ilusionistas, Los Ecos (you’ll be getting the gist from the far-out band names) are given a single track, sometimes more. Some tracks have words, most don’t. But all conflate Peruvian influences – whether it’s via a cumbia backbeat, a salsa rhythm or a provincial criollo or Andean huayño treatment – with what was at the time the worldwide phenomenon of acid-inspired hippy music. The tracks often feel live or at least rawly recorded in a single shot (and the masters are scratchy and imperfect), and for all the playful instrumentation there’s always a hypnotic, insect-like beat and a sunny but sassy attitude. It’s the sound of a Peru that predates the Shining Path atrocities and Fujimori’s narrow populism, and it’s cooler and more cosmopolitan – bridging the traditions of the mountains, the jungle and the coast – and more open to foreign ideas than the present Peru. A really great album: it’s a pity that Europe and the US weren’t as receptive to global cool back then as Peru clearly must have been.