Dominican music scene has been waiting for an artist like Vic Contreras, who finally started his career in an impressive way.
Vic Contreras has played and recorded with Riccie Oriach, Guillelmo del Tuete, La Kereya, Manny Audico & La Cooperativa, Un Día Perfecto para el Pez Banana (Argentina) and others. He’s also a member of the Guloya Theater as a technician, actor and musician, initial point of connection in the projects of La Alucinante Banda.
This year Vic makes two important premieres in his career: the first is a video “Lavando” (which came later) of one of his earliest songs, and the second his first album, “La Vida Es Sueño” EP.
“Lavando” begins with a clave and strings like any Cuban son, to give us a double voice that takes us out of Cuba and takes us to Santo Domingo, a voice work that accompanies an electric guitar that breaks, and we hear those vocal games again He showed us in “No La Controles” (his first song) a stamp that defines his quality as an interpreter.
Now “Lavando” has video by Andrés Miolan, a young and experienced Dominican filmmaker who has a high level of talent. In the video, we see Vic and La alucinante Band stripping off their clothes and throwing themselves into the sea, like the one who cleanses up to the soul.
“La vida es Sueño” EP is the result of the work of Vic together with La Alucinante Banda, a project that reaffirms those new sounds in the Dominican music scene that seeks to present a new proposal together with other groups, artists and genres within the so-called musicians alternative.
We have 13 minutes divided into 4 songs, in which we review the path traveled by Vic in recent years. The album brings the premise of being a work based on “Psicodelia with Afro-Dominican drums”, produced together with Sosa Más Nada, with the help and collaborations of well-known figures such as La Marimba and Luitomá, jazz musicians Jonatan Pina and Isaac Hernández, and international guests as Alex Contreras (Colombia), Javier Rabinovich and Iñaki Ruibal (Argentina); with engineering, mixing and mastering by JV Olivier.
Opening the album we have “Irse para volver”, a theme that blends guitars with percussion and choirs with Congo as a base, talking about the process that we all carry out in which we want to stand firm before a commitment, but we know what it costs.”Semilla” is a bachata with porteño flavor that mutates with fragments of guitars and an insistent guira under choirs like a mantra.
“Invisible” is the social part in this album. It is a funk that flirts with the wave of the acid funk, and gives us an audio that confirms what we suspect when talking about “there are no more brains to give, no patriots you can win”, followed by the participation of rapper Stross. We closed with “La Vida es Sueño”, a song on the Latin wave with a key, marking a sound trip closing the whole cycle from the experiences of Vic, taking as a starting point the Spanish Calderón de la Barca.
For a long time the scene awaited the first production of one of the new faces of the current Dominican music scene. Now we have to wait for it to dictate time.
Stream “La Vida Es Sueño” on Spotify.
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