From Medellín, Colombia, this is the first record of the brilliant beatmaker Crudo Means Raw as an MC.
“Todos tienen qué comer” is an album taken care of until the minimal detail of the beat and with a powerful rhyme in which it kills all its demons without mercy.
♪♫ Listen: “Sangre en el Pool Party” + album stream
Crudo Means Raw on Soundcloud, Facebook, Instagram.
Cero 39 is, and always will be, a rarity worth discovering. His music travels from the spice Latin music like the Puerto Rican dembow, to the music of the Colombian Pacific.
Its mixture is authentic and acidic, although the play of its letters seems more a caricature ironic of what it does. Moni Moni is a party from start to finish.
♪♫ Listen: “Pau” + album stream
Cero 39 on Soundcloud, Facebook, www.
Doble Porcion is just a part of the new school in rap paisa from Medellín in north-west Colombia.
A duo of MC’s sings to the routine, the vices of youth, the vice of composing, writing, fucking, smoking marijuana all day and sing songs of their life as if nothing else mattered.
♪♫ Listen: “Manzanas a la Vuelta” + album stream
Edson Velandia is perhaps one of the best lyricists we have in Colombia, his capacity transcends the virtuosity of the guitar or the poetics of his lyrics.
It is much more than that, it is the creativity at the service of a chronicler, comedian and artist who – in his ironic and sarcastic way – lets us see their realities drenched in satire and narrated perfectly.
In this album called “El Karateca”, he speaks of the love, the sex, the death, the drama and the violence.
♪♫ Listen: “La muerte de Jaime Garzón” + album stream
“Grow” is the second release of the solo project by Gabriela Jimeno, an EP of three songs in which we travel through wooded landscapes and volcanoes that threaten to end the Earth.
This is a universe full of light, covered by a mixture of electronic elements, synths, arpeggiators and drum machines Ela Minus has dubbed “tiny dance”. Music to levitate in a distant galaxy.
♪♫ Listen: “House on a Mountain” + album stream
Ela Minus on Soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
This is the most folk version of hip hop. Far from DJs, computers and beats, Kombilesa Mi convert traditional instruments like tamboras and maracas to create the bases of their songs that are sung in Spanish and Palenquero, their native language.
This is a new expression of the history of its people immortalized not only in the traditional rhythms, but in something more contemporary.
♪♫ Listen: “Í Kele” + album stream
Kombilesa Mi on Soundcloud, Facebook, Instagram.
To listen to Las Hermanas, the project of beats and sampling of the visual artist Diego Cuellar, is somehow to detach from the world and enter a parallel universe of experimental sounds that can be a hip hop or an ambient of ultratumba.
On “Nadie jamás ha visto una calavera triste”, dark rhythms are created and constantly deconstructed to create a dark aura. If there was a party after death, it would sound like this.
♪♫ Listen: “Juicio Final” + album stream
Machine and drum. Beats and descarga latina. Scratch and pregoneo. SalsanGroove is more than a simple fusion, it is a fluid dialogue, a complicity between the furious of the traditional salsa and the avant-garde of the electronic sounds.
It is, in the last, a fantastic and even visionary union, a meeting point between the tradition of the unrestrained Latin rhythm, with the current and growing current of electronic music. The salsa of the future is today.
♪♫ Listen: “Salsangroove” + album stream
This is the third album of Systema Solar, the most contestatory and pop at a time, where you can taste the sound and flavor of the berbena, the Caribbean party.
But “Rumbo a Tierra” also involves an important social message in front of the genre, in front of here and now, the place where we are standing and where there is no turning back.
It is a discursive album whose power is in that it is made for dancing, but also to go beyond the obvious and dig a little bit into society.
♪♫ Listen: “Rumbera” + album stream
Systema Solar on Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, Twitter.
This is neither gangster, or conscience rap, it is the beating of a teenager from Envigado who got together with some of the most daring beatmakers in the area like Arkeologo or Crudo Means Raw and MCs like Mañas Ru Fino and N.Hardem to join this bomb.
“La Bomba de Zirozhima” is loaded with bitter truths, contemplative themes and sagacious rhymes, which accompany the classic rap bases, with the most experimental egotrip.
♪♫ Listen: “Síndrome de Estocolmo” + album stream
Zof Ziro on Facebook.