el hijo de la cumbia

After the electro tango wave, watch out for the beachcomber of nueva cumbia… A total electronic tsunami which took over Buenos Aires and is descending upon the old continent! The ground has been shaking to these telluric rhythms for nearly ten years now, with the Argentinean capital as its epicenter. Among the heroes of this almost tropical fever, the real malandro is El Hijo de la Cumbia! He started as a pioneer and is now the patron, the guardian, whose every release is eagerly anticipated by the growing numbers of nueva cumbia fans.

Emiliano Gómez started playing around with keyboards at the age of twelve, in 1996. Ever since, he has been skillfully mixing styles and doing masterful remixes for numerous Mexican and American “sonideros”, but also for Gotan Project and Toy Selekhtah from Sonidero Nacional, even producing the hip hop band MP3. The ambition behind the broken-up rhythms of this Argentinean suburban kid is to unite the world’s ghettoes into his ghetto blaster.

This bears no relation to the tepid UK productions, or with yet another pale American techno imitation. The goal here is to invent an electronic soundtrack stemming from local traditions. The result is a dynamic concoction of urban sounds and traditional music to rock preconception as well as the dancefloors. You have to have been drenched in sweat at one of his DJ sets to take in the measure of his “Freestyle de Ritmos”, a self-explanatory title. This record was released in 2010 by ¡Ya Basta!: from hip hop to dance-hall, from dubstep to house music, El Hijo infiltrates the cumbia classics with hallucinatory breakbeats, with a savage but sophisticated creativity. In one word: unique.