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Guajira Espacial

by Contento

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about

On their debut album Contento established themselves as a pair of expatriate Colombian ‘salsapunks’ who play music that makes people feel happy, and this is something they didn’t plan on stopping on their follow-up release, even when COVID took one of their members out of circula on.
Lo Bueno Está Aquí, their rst album and winner of The Guardian’s Album of the Month, encapsulated a modern vision for salsa that evolved over a period of three years. Their new release, En Lancha Pal Futuro, con nues that same vision, but in contrast was made during a year of living abnormally.

Due to COVID, Sano (DJ, producer and purveyor of minimalist La n house for Berlin’s cu ng-edge Cómeme label) le his Barcelona residence to return to his na ve Colombia. With one half of the Contento team holed up in the mountains outside Medellín, communica ons became a challenge. Nevertheless, Sano was able to send some basic ideas for his cohort to embellish.

Back in his adop ve Geneva, Paulo Olarte – a member of Acid Coco and Jaguar who also records as El Dragón Criollo – worked on Sano’s energe c piano ri s, with “Guajira Especial” one of a number of tracks that Paulo re-worked and re-modelled from Sano’s original sound sketches. Paulo outlines the process he followed during an intense fortnight of work in his studio: “I nished the songs, that is I edited them, I recorded the percussion, I recorded the bass, I recorded the guitars.” And he added his voice. The result? Something cut from the duo’s tried and tested template: “a new salsa sound”, as Paulo describes it, salsa stripped back to expose the genre’s raw ingredients. Take an irresis ble beat based around the tumbao or groove, marinated in a spicy blend of boogaloo and cumbia; add a simple, devilishly catchy melody; then sing with gusto and play on keyboards, bass, percussion and vintage drum machines.

Yet, “Guajira Especial” is one of the examples of how the duo managed to work together despite COVID, as a er their ini al collabora ons Sano, due to the lack of a decent studio and poor Internet, fell out of the loop, leaving Paulo to build the album out of sketches the two of them had been pu ng together stretching back to when they rst met. Remarkably, the energy and ethos of Contento remains undimmed throughout.
An infec ous concoc on, the new single con rms that the recipe works. The proof of the pudding is in the dancing. On one hand “Guajira Especial”, a Cosmic Guajira perhaps, comes across as a lo- treat for movers and groovers that borrows the homemade spirit of garage rock. Yet it’s also clean and sophis cated in the playful way be ng a couple of arch hipsters. Despite their problems of social-distancing, there’s plenty more to come from Contento.

credits

released September 3, 2021
ditto.fm/guajira-espacial
Mastering by Lad Agabekov @ Caduceus Studios
Ilustraciones Mateo Corral
Dirección de Arte Daria Mechkat

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Contento Switzerland

Paulo and Sano aka CONTENTO had so many friends in common that it was like they knew each other for many years before they actually met. In 2011 they finally had the pleasure of seeing their faces for the first time. This happens in Berlin at a concert by the master Eddie Palmieri at the House of World Cultures and it set a precedent. ... more

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