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 juxtaposed 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: Menudo Mix
DJ: Ganas & Enorbito
There are two DJs behind today’s mixtape, Ganas and Enorbito, and both come, along with DJ Lengua and Chico Sonido, from the larger family of LA-based selectors who specialize in obsessively digging for old-school forgotten gems of Latin vinyl.
Anything from Peruvian psychedelic chicha to chicano garage rock, to campy Mexican covers of international disco hits. If it has a name in Spanish and it’s pressed on vinyl, these guys will rescue it from oblivion and play it at their parties (Más Exitos and Más Discoteca) and feature it in their mixtapes as if it was the hottest new digital tune released minutes ago.
As we already noticed from the similar Ay qué vintage! by DJ Chee-Bo (another LA-based music archeologist), these types of mixtapes tend to focus mainly on exposing rare finds, rather than showing off technical proficiency. Meaning, the transitions aren’t particularly seamless, they just line up one song after the next. In their defense, the mix was recorded live using exclusively real vinyl records, so no MP3s were harmed during the recording.