Music

Your Mix Fix: El Búho's Buenos Aires-Inspired Mixtape

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Photo by: Alex Yallop.

The word mixtape has plenty of different interpretations. It used to be that mixtapes were actually DJ sets recorded on cassette tapes, but with the coming of the digital music age, the name remained the same, but the definition expanded. Nowadays, people call mixtapes many different things, some of which are not necessarily mixed and most of which were never taped. Here we try to cover them all. In this column, Juan Data gives you a worthy one every week.

DJ: El Búho
MIXTAPE: INI Tropical Stage Graefenthal

It never ceases to fascinate me the impact that cumbia in general (and ñu-cumbia in particular) had in the old continent, especially amongst people who didn’t have any explicit blood connection to Latin American culture or even grew up close to it.

El Búho was born in a small town in the north of England and took Spanish classes in college, but it wasn’t until he visited Buenos Aires that he discovered cumbia, the same way many other visiting gringos did: by attending the now legendary Zizek parties. After his return to Europe he started producing his own atmospheric, hypnotic, down-tempo ñu-cumbia tracks and quickly became known in the blogosphere as one of the most promising up-and-coming producers in the genre.

Here we have El Búho (now an Amsterdam resident, and a Greenpeace activist by day) conducting a 2-hour-plus live set at some medieval monastery in the eastern Netherlands, and if you close your eyes while listening you can easily be transported to the trippy atmosphere reigning in that event. Be on the look out of El Búho’s upcoming ZZK Records, debut dropping late 2014.

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