Scattermusic Radio #5 – Cumbia Cosmonauts!

I’ve been hanging out for this one for a while now and if you’ve seen the Cumbia Cosmonauts super heavy live show you’d understand why. With so much of the club music right now being crowded, intensely compressed and generally over the top, it’s so good to hear anything this spacious that’s still full of energy. The attention to detail here is also of the hook with every track being completely remixed to the point where you could safely call it an album of versions. But this really is only just the beginning for this unruly cohort of cumbia hustlers as they’re currently putting the finishing touches to a truly dope EP and European tour for later this year. Don’t sleep.

Cumbia Cosmonauts – Scattermusic Podcast #5

Tracklist:

Cumbianauts Incoming
Since My Love Died
Jungle Chichatón
Congo Jungle
Cumbia Disco
La Pollera Rebaja
My Grandfather ‘s Dead
My Mule Don’t Like People Laughing

Also recently I took time to head over to the Cosmonauts studio and quiz them as to how their super heavy, deep bass and blazing horn arrangements had come into existence. The result is the short, transcribed interview below.

L > Lewis CanCut

M > Saca La Mois Dj

S > Soup

Taken 17/05/2010

L: Moses, so as far as I can gather your background comes from traveling around collecting regional styles of music digitally yeah?

M: Mostly physically, but more recently also digitally.  Yeah, that’s what I did even before getting into DJing actually.  Having a selection of music that other people didn’t but found to be exotic got me invited into being on radio and from there it then got transferred into the live context of being a DJ. Obviously once you’re in it then you start looking for music specifically for your DJ set and I’ve always been mostly dance floor focused. Before all that when I was kid growing up in Switzerland I played the accordion, though that disappeared when I moved to Australia. But that sound has stuck in my head which is why years down the track, hearing a style of music that is dominated by accordion with a very simple beat being Cumbia, it just grabbed me.

L: You’re known in Melbourne as one of the granddaddies of the world music club scene, at what point did you start specifically start collecting global sounds?

M: I’m too young to be any type of grandaddy…but I’ve always collected global sounds, even as a kid in Switzerland. Growing up in Europe you don’t understand 90% of the words, which tends to destroy the barriers of what is the known world and what is the unknown world. If it’s a sound I like then I grab it. When I moved to Melbourne though it became like a political mission in the pioneering days when anywhere you played people would be “Uhh..What is that”?

L: Now worldly sounds are trendy though ever since Baile Funk blew up right?

M: Basically yeah, that was a really big thing.

L: And Soup your musical background from what I can piece together is in experimental beats?

S: Well yeah but when was a kid I studied guitar and up until my late teens wanted to be a session jazz guitar player and get like $300 every time I recorded. That’s obviously a bygone era though which made me think, “what do I really wanted to do anyway”, like develop an identity and experiment with new ideas and new mediums. Then I realized that I much preferred to make music using a computer rather than a guitar anyway because it gave me a sound canvas that was a million times bigger.

L: Soup you’ve got several projects on the go besides the Cosmonauts right?

S:Yeah Miso and Editor, which are both going strong. Because of those projects though I’m also doing well with a bunch of freelance production work. I’m definitely more rooted in the live music scene of Melbourne because when I got here and wanted to play guitar I met a lot of bands, drummers etc.

L: Has that helped you out being a musician that knows production because in Melbourne those scenes don’t cross over much?

S: Yeah, the protocol is so different. It’s such a competitive edge and a benefit to your music if you’re a producer that knows how to talk about instruments and ways of writing for them.

M: With the Cumbia Cosmonauts we work with so many acoustic musicians and Soup already had a big network, which is what we now use for the sound system.

L: So how was it that you guys actually formed as the Cosmonauts?

M: We’d known each other for a while and Soup was always very encouraging for me to get into production and I was trying to get Soup to do more DJing haha. “You can make money DJing!” I got obsessed with cumbia and asked Soup to help me musically and technically to produce it and he said “yeah sounds awesome, lets do a track”. Soup had a sound system party in the park and I DJed cumbia there. Carlos (Cosmonauts’ accordion player) was this guy I’d never met there who was dancing like mad saying “this is the music my parents play”. So the first productive meeting we had was the three of us in the studio actually.

S: I didn’t even know what cumbia was when we wrote the first track haha.

L: All you need to know is the chh…..ch.ch.chh…..ch.ch.chh…..ch.ch.chh..

S: That’s how I now describe it to people.

L: So to finish up, you guys not only have this mixtape out now but also an EP of original material that’s not far off?

S: Yeah, it’s funny because we’re calling it a mixtape due to the sampling that’s going on and we need to obviously give it a moniker that’s a homage to the original creators of the music which we’re, for want of a better word; appropriating. In saying that though, the amount of work that’s gone into (remixing) each track on the mixtape is similar to writing a new track. For me that was really important to get inside the sound, I feel informed now so when it comes writing tracks where we don’t sample traditional cumbia, I’ve got something to draw upon.

M: That’s the first offering of getting to know the music; you start with samples and build something around it. Then after a while you realize you don’t need to have the foundation from a sample, you can build the foundation yourself.