Once upon a time I gave Philippe Cohen Solal (of Gotan Project) a few CDs of experiments with the Colombian rhythm of Cumbia, which I had sourced from travels in Mexico, myspace, blogs, or directly from producers and DJs in Tijuana, Mexico City, Monterrey, Bogota and Buenos Aires.  I figured someone who had very successfully innovated with Tango, would be interested in another similar movement going on with another Latin American genre known as Cumbia.  In fact I was so excited about this new twist on cumbia, that in 2008 I started a project called Cumbia Cosmonauts with Thomas “Soup” Campbell and Carlos Parraga at home in Melbourne.  Some months later I sent Philippe the first Cumbia Cosmonauts songs, and by then the Argentinians had become the most organised in Latin America by launching the ZZK Records label, and essentially giving rise to a genre known as “Digital Cumbia” or “Nueva Cumbia”.  By then Philippe had also become excited about the potential of Nueva Cumbia to shake up the music world the way Gotan did with Tango.  Fast forward to 2011 and Gotan Project has released an album of Nueva Cumbia remixes of their hit 2001 release ‘La Revancha del Tango’:

It features the ZZK Records family of artists such as Chancha Via Circuito, Tremor, Frikstailers, El Remolon, as well as El Hijo de la Cumbia, Axel Krygier and Colombian sensation Bomba Estereo.

To launch the Cumbia remixes compilation, an event in Paris was held a couple of weeks ago with live performances from Tremor and also an illuminating DJ Set by Christoph H. Muller (also of Gotan Project).  Going far beyond Nueva Cumbia, Christoph has put together an innovative Mix that could be described as “Futurist Andean”:

This mix was originally performed on October 13th 2011 @ Ya Basta Festibal in Paris, France