From the Place Where Volcanos and Earthquakes Reside by Javo Onofre

In the next posts i´ll be talking about new latin american music, in the last years there has been a real explosion of bands, projects, labels, netlabels, blogs and i really feel that now more than ever latin independent music has taken a nice turn and there are quite a handful number of interesting projects to talk about and take a good and deep listening to...

I´m going to start with 2 of my favorite bands so far, both curiously from the country that has been in everybody´s mouth these days, Chile...a mix of talent, experience, energy, youth and great musical taste can never go wrong to a musical project and the first example its Fakuta, an electro pop musician/composer/producer/label manager girl from Santiago de Chile...

Fakuta its all about dream pop landscapes, with beautiful vocal arrangements and great structured melodies giving us an elegant outcome when she puts all of this elements together, an example would be "Las partes" track featured on her myspace www.myspace.com/musicafakuta an overwhelming pop piece with a contrasting aesthetic between lyrics and music, where you can feel the strength of the melody breaking inside the post apocalyptic lyrics...

When performing live Fakuta is joined by her vocal girls choir The Laura Palmers giving to the live act a lot of presence and personality which you can percieve in the next video...

If there is something i would like to make emphasis about these projects its the artistry and stage presence they have, there are no pretentions or false poses, they are who they are and they are honest about it, something most musicians/artists keep forgetting nowadays...

Another astonishing proposal would be Dejaneiros an art-pop psychodelia project formed by Milton Mahan and Pablo Muñoz also from Chile, i have to confess that the first time i heard this band my jaw fell to the ground by the impressive and enormous sound they accomplished, both sound engineers and part of another musical projects they made at least from my point of view one of the best independent records of 2009 with multilayered synths and spacial melodies

Plateado its one huge record.

They have a strong epic sound but somehow they managed to put also a lot of feeling into it, a melodramatic soundtrack for modern times...i really recommend Los Caribes track to have a big picture of what this project its all about...check out this great video for they single Montreal

de janeiros - montreal from al unisono on Vimeo.

You can find and download for free these and other really interesting music projects in Fakuta´s label Michita Rex here:http://www.michitarex.com/

See you next week...

From the Place Where Volcanos and Earthquakes Reside by Javo Onofre

may the beasts keep roaring and a look into central market

If there´s an album i just cant stop listening to and i cant stop recommending these days its Wild Beasts “Two dancers” (Domino 2009)...from the opening chords of “The fun powder plot” you just know that this is going to be a great record to hear, what´s the big deal about it that makes it one of the best 2009 albums? i would say that the way of handling falsetto by their two singers its so near to perfection that makes it work out so well with the never-ending delays and guitar harmonies

it´s not easy to use falsetto there´s a really thin line between making a good job or just screw the whole song up and frontman Hayden Thorpe knows exactly what he is doing in this art-pop record full of ethereal compositions with strong lyrics and dance floor beats

a look into central market

another recomendation i would like to make its for the majestic debut of Battles frontman Tyondai Braxton with his ambicious solo project, in his first album Central Market he basically took an orchestra put them inside a room and gave them his vision of music translated into partitures.

a wild trip inside braxton´s world through imaginary landscapes, an enormous variety of instrumentation from all kinds of brass, kazoos to strings weird voices with a final outcome that makes you remember of a crazy cartoonish psychodelic soundtrack.

“Platinum rows” its the central theme for this record and i would describe it as nothing less than a masterpiece of our days, full of unusual musical harmonies with Braxton compositional style all over the song this is one of those albums that nobody should miss the opportunity to hear, in the next interview Braxton explains how he recorded the album working in a multilayer style, recording each part of the orchestra brass, woodwinds, strings, etc separatedly so he could then put them all together as a big musical puzzle.

This album had been cooking in Braxton studio in New York for years and as Pitchfork media described it "Central Market proves bigger in the sense that it's clearly been delivered as a statement record-- a summation of lots of ideas accrued over the years and lots of restless thinking about how best to engage those ideas in ways far from expected".

Hope you enjoy listening to both of these records more recommendations coming soon....

may the beasts keep roaring and a look into central market