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: The Whiskey Barons Mix
DJ: The Whiskey Barons
The Whiskey Barons are a duo of Boston-based producers who spend their days reworking old funky jams and updating them for the current dance floors. They find good tunes from the past with great dance potential and make them DJ friendly by reinforcing the back beat, stretching the intros and outros, and locking the BPMs, so they are easier to mix. Fortunately for us, a lot of these resurrected mixable gems come from the vastly unexplored Latin side of the spectrum. Forgotten Fania songs and classic Colombian cumbias get a second chance in the night club scene thanks to the re-edits of the Barons.
Here we have them putting together a 50+ minutes long mixtape of everything funky, including many of their reworks of Latin bangers, along with plenty other stuff. Not all the remixes are theirs, there’re some by GRC, Quantic, and Beatconductor, in other words, pretty much everybody that’s currently helping keep the funk alive in old-school Latin music.