North America’s psychedelic cumbia pioneers Chicha Libre launched the first psychedelic cumbia and chicha wave in North America in 2006 with its debut album Sonido Amazonico on Barbès Records – a tribute to 70’s Peruvian tropical rhythms and psychedelic sounds.
Chicha is originally the name of a corn-based liquor favored by the Incas in pre-colombian days. Chicha is also the name of Peru’s particular brand of cumbia first made popular in the late 60’s by bands such as Los Destellos, Manzanita, Los Mirlos and Juaneco y su Combo. While loosely inspired by Colombian accordion-driven cumbias, chicha incorporated the distinctive pentatonic scales of Andean melodies, some Cuban son, and the sounds of surf guitars, farfisa organs and moog synthesizers; an oddly post-modern combination of western psychedelia, Cuban and Colombian rhythms, national melodies and idiosyncratic inventions which were close in spirit to the Congolese rumba of Franco or the pop syncretism of Os Mutantes.
Chicha Libre’s sound and approach are completely indebted to the Peruvian bands it originally emulated. Like their mentors, they use surf guitar, organ sounds and latin percussion to play a mixture of borrowed and homegrown sounds. Their sound has become more processed, synth sounds and treated guitars and the borrowings differ from that of Peruvian precursors – classical music and pop debris from 3 continents in Chicha Libre’s case – but the latin rhythms that form the basis of the music are both as inherent and as foreign to them as they were to the Shipibo Indians who first took up the electric guitar.
The current six member Chicha Libre is made up of French, US, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and Mexican musicians who play a mixture of latin rhythms, surf and psychedelic pop inspired by Peruvian music from Lima and the Amazon: Olivier Conan on cuatro, vocals; Joshua Camp on keytar, accordion, vocals; Karina Colis on timbales, vocals; Dan Martinez on bass; Neil Ochoa on congas and Stephen Ulrich on guitar.
