Née: DJ Caution, Laura Lima, El Meditador & William Carreazo.
Raíces: Colombia, Cuba, Spain
Sounds like: Bomba Estéreo, Los Transatlánticos, Checkpoint Guanabana
You should listen to Ovni Guarajé because: I’m pretty sure they don’t give anal probes to abductees on the mothership.
Ready for a close encounter of the third kind? This Ovni (Spanish acronym for UFO) takes off from Madrid, Spain and the flight crew includes a talented female singer of Cuban origin, a self-appointed shaman, a renowned hip-hop DJ and an Afro-Colombian percussionist. If that doesn’t sound like a premise for a Latino remake of Lost In Space, I don’t know what does.
It’d be expected to compare them with Bomba Estéreo, having both a charismatic front-woman mixing balanced doses of rapping and singing over digitally-processed cumbia samples. But this Ovni’s formula goes beyond Colombia as the obvious source of musical inspiration, borrowing from a large pan-Latin palette. Plus they have a legit turntablist adding some scratches.
Get a free download of their single “Caminito de Belén” below and make sure you check out the rest of their album, Don De Maya, released independently through bandcamp and including plenty of hot tracks with undeniable dancefloor-igniting potential and maybe some interstellar-tripping qualities too.