Event

Chicha Libre

Chicha Libre plays a mixture of latin rhythms, surf music and psychedelic pop, inspired by Peruvian music from Lima and the Amazon. The Brooklyn-based band mixes up covers of forgotten Chicha classics with French-tinged originals, re-interpretations of 70s pop classics, and cumbia versions of pieces by Satie and Wagner.

Chicha is 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 made popular in the late 60s by bands such as Los Destellos, Manzanita, Los Mirlos and Juaneco y su Combo.

Chicha was loosely inspired by Colombian accordion-driven cumbias but incorporated the distinctive pentatonic scales of Andean melodies, some Cuban son, and the psychedelic sounds of surf guitars, farfisa organs and moog synthesizers. Peruvian chicha bands were playing an oddly post-modern combination of western psychedelia, Cuban and Colombian rhythms, national melodies and idiosyncratic inventions which were close in spirit to both the Congolese rumba of Franco and the pop syncretism of Os Mutantes.

The music is so fresh, so exciting and its appeal so effortlessly universal that it still seems strange that it never managed to find an international audience. Chicha Libre started as a way to pay tribute to the music. The group includes musicians associated with the great Brooklyn bar and venue barbès, including keyboardist Joshua Camp, who plays the Electravox, an antiquated accordion/organ hybrid; Olivier Conan on Cuatro and vocals; bassist Nicholas Cudahy, whose former band, Combustible Edison, knew a thing or two about pop syncretism; guitarist Vincent Douglas; and percussionists Karina Colis and Neil Ochoa.

Two sets! Plus world psychedelic classics before and between from DJs Twin Spin.