Cumbia de Satanas

Any DJ set tells you, unconsciously or not, about its author. Through the record choices and the way they are organized, one can feel the DJ’s state of mind and find out a bit more about the musical deposit discovered that is being shared and dug through by him or her at the moment.

Any DJ set tells you, unconsciously or not, about its author. Through the record choices and the way they are organized, one can feel the DJ’s state of mind and find out a bit more about the musical deposit discovered that is being shared and dug through by him or her at the moment.

When you've got Prince's seal of approval, little else matters. Austinites Grupo Fantasma have long been the Purple One's band du jour, logging a two-month residency at his Las Vegas nightclub 3121, a Golden Globes after party performance that saw the band joined by Prince, Talib Kweli, Will.i.am, Mary J. Blige, and Marc Anthony, as well as other performances alongside the icon in London, Miami and the Capital City itself. Sonidos Gold is the best document of Grupo's cumbia-salsa-funk fusion to date. Led by guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada, the Grupo orchestra is in fine form on the dozen tracks that make up Sonidos, and give, as the title would suggest, a golden performance.

Lovers of the Spanish Baroque may be surprised to see the subtitle "17th-century violin music in Spain" here, inasmuch as non-keyboard instrumental chamber music following Italian models has never surfaced before. Indeed, the booklet transmits statements by writers of the time bemoaning the lack of such violin music. What's happening here is that Spanish historical-instrument group La Real Cámara and its director-violinist Emilio Moreno have hypothesized that Spanish organ music might have been arranged for other instruments in the same way Italian music certainly was; Girolamo Frescobaldi specifically attested to this.