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 new column, Juan Data gives you a worthy one every week.
MIXTAPE: Puerto de Palos
DJ: Zonora Point +Douster
In the classic sense, a mixtape has music from a variety of sources, different artist, different albums, and different genres, mixed together by a DJ. In recent years, however, the terminology has expanded, particularly in the hip-hop world, to include a whole different kind of release: unofficial albums, like demos, with less production values or uncleared samples but with just one artist or group in its focus.
That’s the kind of mixtape we’re introducing here today. There’s a DJ/producer putting it together, a Frenchman residing in Argentina known as Douster, but the spotlight is on the artist, the Chilean new-school rap trio Zonora Point. Both names will sound familiar to the Zizek fans, since they appeared together in the second volume of the ZZK Sound compilation series (Nacional Records, 2009).
Now, don’t assume that because of their Zizek affiliation you’ll be finding a lot of nu-cumbia here. It’s mostly just party rap, with lyrics about women, alcohol, drugs, and explicit sex over slow-moving, wobbling beats. Douster plays host and blends all the 11 tracks into one cohesive mix, but unlike all the mixtapes that we’ve been posting here in the past couple of months, this one is not presented as one long audio file, instead it’s broken up in tracks. Still it works better if listened all together in the right order.
Download Douster’s Zonora Point mixtape, Puerto de Palos, HERE.