The Meridian Brothers

Touching down from Bogota, Columbia, Meridian Brothers are here to shoot their deliciously weird and loose psycho-tropical groove through summer 2014.

At its core this is the one-man family band of restlessly experimental musical director, adventurous guitarist and legend of the Bogota subterranea Eblis Álvarez; yet onstage Meridian Brothers scale up to a five-person rocking squad fit to hotwire festival stages...with every last limb busy on an array of synths, brass, percussion, electronics and peculiar props, it's a rich and strange, BPM-surfing dancefloor concoction all garnished by Álvarez's slithery, effects-laden croon and freewheeling six-string deviations.

Far from a mere 21st century update of the melodies and rhythms of cumbia, porro and salsa, Meridian Brothers ingeniously do things the other way round: Alvarez's own idiosyncratic soundpool (honed across years of splenetic cassette release activity on the independent Columbian scene) forms the template for a style undoubtedly steeped in the potent mores of those traditional musics, but also venturing deep down into the same playtime weirdo-rock cavities as latter day Deerhoof, the vintage film soundtrack archive, the dub-bass echo chamber and the laced late-sixties sonic crop harvested by Silver Apples/Presidents Of The USA et al...all brewed up and boiled down to perfection in an overcrowded Bogota bedroom.

New album, the bizarre and wonderful ‘Salvadora Robot' (out in June on legendary outernationalist London imprint Soundway), heads deeper into the tropical rhythms of Latin America and the Caribbean, each song focusing on a different style and playfully twists it into Meridian Brothers's surreal landscape.. Debut album 'Desesperanza' (meaning hopelessness in English) came out last year on Soundway, and was dedicated exclusively to salsa and tropical music, twisting it through a dark and theatrical soundscape but never abandoning the traditional aesthetics.

 

The Meridian Brothers also played at...

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