Frente Cumbiero meets Mad Professor

Guyana-born dub master Mad Professor certainly gets around. The list of international collaborators he has worked with is pretty exhaustive, from France’s Spook & The Guay to Brazil’s Marcelinho da Lua. For his latest global mash-up, he’s grabbed his passport and headed to Bogotá to team up with one of Colombia’s premier exponents of cumbia, Frente Cumbiero. The premise is certainly exciting: an international producer mixing up a musical genre that has become the hottest sound in Latin America. And the colourful cover artwork is fantastic, too, with Frente Cumbiero wired up to a futuristic pod with the Professor working his magic at the mixing station.

While this turns out to be an enjoyable enough disc, it’s also a slight disappointment. Here was a real chance to push the boundaries of fusion – via the funding of the British Council’s excellent Incubator project – that in the end plays it safe. Perhaps Frente’s organic, slightly jazz-leaning cumbia, as heard on tracks one to seven, hasn’t excited the creative juices of Mad Professor, because his dubs (tracks eight to 14) sound slightly flat and half¬hearted. It would have been nice to have a few higher-tempo remixes in there, where he really went wild on the distortion and threw in a few more sound effects.

Part of the problem is the fact that there are only two vocal tracks – ‘Ariwacumbe’ (a globetrotting tune in English with hints of Balkan beats) and the far more successful ‘Analógica’, featuring the vocals of Kiño and Javier Fonseca – which makes the album quite samey. All in all this is good – but certainly not great.