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// El Hijo De La Cumbia 
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El Hijo de la Cumbia
He’s got the perfect b-boy look, with a twist. There under his XL Tshirt the tattoo of an accordion and a guiro are a sign of this young Argentinian musician’s commitment to cumbia, a rhythm etched into Latin America’s DNA. You can find regional variations of this Afro-Colombian roots tradition all over the continent. And in the last few years there has been a new cumbia explosion, driven by a generation of producers, mostly from Argentina and Mexico, who combine traditional cumbia with electronic beats, hip hop or reggae. One of the pioneers of this new wave who is gaining more and more global fans is El Hijo De La Cumbia (The Son of Cumbia), the first digital cumbia artist signed to a European label.
El Hijo de la Cumbia - La Mara Tomaza
Born in San Martin, in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Emiliano Gómez spent his teenage years playing piano in bands at ‘bailantes’ - popular dances where cumbia rules. Since the 1960s, cumbia dominated the Argentinian capital with the arrival of migrants from the northern provinces and neighbouring countries, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Despite its huge popularity it was stigmatised as an expression of the poorest sectors of society. “Like reggae and hip hop, cumbia is a rhythm of African origin which took shape in the ghetto. It was natural that these musical styles would end up together” says Gómez. His early productions were influenced by the Mexican ‘cumbia sonidera’ style, which zapped cumbia with amplification and remix techniques similar to those of Jamaican sound systems. For twelve years Gómez has been exploring what happens when you cross the nonchalant syncopation of cumbia with the power of urban beats. It’s an experimental approach he shares with the Buenos Aires Zizek collective, who run clubnights and released digital cumbia compilations on their ZZK label just as the scene was erupting. The quality of El Hijo De La Cumbia’s tracks and mixes didn’t go unnoticed. His debut Freestyle de Ritmos, was released in the US on Jace Clayton’s Soot label in 2008. And it’s now being reissued with two bonus tracks on Ya Basta! “My aim is to make cumbia evolve but keep its essence, that organic swing that’s impossible to get on a computer. That’s why I still work exclusively with samples of old cumbia records. But the next stage will naturally be to record with musicians too.”
E l Hijo De La Cumbia - Freestyle de Ritmos is out now
Blog: www.emayocutz.com
Yannis Ruel
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