Latin Noir: Everything Happens on the Beach

Noir and ‘beach’: two of the great clichés of cultural revisionism. The chamamé rhythms of Chango Spasiuk, Carlos Puebla’s song ‘Commandante Che Guevara’ and the rustic melancholia of Cuba’s Conjunto Campesino Cuyaguateje are related neither to sandy strips of sunniness nor the cinematic or literary worlds defined by the word noir. Berlin-based, Sicilian-born compiler and DJ Sonia Brex is thinking tangentially, we have to assume, and the tangent just about hits its curve. The songs collected are pretty lovely – especially Alfredo Gutiérrez’s lo-fi vintage vallenato ‘La Distancia, a massive seven minutes of accordion riffing that might have been a model for the early Velvet Underground. There’s also the always interesting pianist Maurice el Médioni performing ‘Oh! Ma Belle’ with drummer and trumpeter Robert Rodríguez. While the sequence and flow is haphazard, the basic idea – of an end-of-day beach vibe – is just too attractive to dismiss. Nothing much actually happens on a beach, if we’re honest, but it can sometimes be a sad space and this is a gorgeously gloomy soundtrack.