A mixtape can be many things, but one thing is for sure, a mixtape is more than just random songs put in a particular order. It’s about recontextualizing sounds, giving them a new meaning (sometimes very different from the original) by setting them side by side, or juxtapozed in ingenious ways with others. Best thing about mixtapes, most of them are FREE (!), and they’re a great way to discover new music. In this column, Juan Data gives you a worthy one every week.
MIXTAPE: Zumbido Da Manhã
DJ: Grita
For the past couple of weeks we’ve been focusing on Brazilian music mixtapes, first with mellow Brazilian soul, later with groovy Brazilian ’70s funk. This one here is not strictly a Brazilian music mixtape but has a lot of what the previous two were missing: baile funk, the epilepsy-inducing electro sound that’s been coming straight outta Rio’s favelas for the last two decades.
Behind the decks is DJ Grita, one half of the Spanish electropical collective Caballito (the other half goes by DJ Bigote). Caballito appeared on the Granadian scene barely a year ago, originally inspired by Argentine cumbia digital collective Zizek. Their series of mixtapes and their blog caught a lot of online buzz and soon they started branching out, adding collaborations with “friends of Caballito” from all over the world and leaving the restrictions of new cumbia to incorporate many other dance-oriented lowbrow genres like kuduro, moombahton, baile funk, and something they call graveton.
Little else is known about these two characters besides their mutual fascination with third-world tropical bass and fluorescent lo-def design. Grita says he prefers to keep his real identity away from the Internet, so he sent us a picture of a boy with a gun as his avatar. Go figure. Let the music talk for itself then.