Secret Planet Presents: Meridian Brothers + Lollise + DJ Bongohead
FRIDAY MAY 10
SECRET LOCATION, TBA
DOORS+DJ 7PM | SHOW 7:30PM
TICKETS $22 ADV / $25 DOOR
ALL AGES (CHILDREN NEED TICKETS THO)
Presented in collaboration with the Northampton Arts Council
Tickets: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/secretplanet/1176656
Info: http://www.secretplanet.live/meridianbros
Facebook RSVP: https://fb.me/e/1M7t0ZztQ
It’s our season finale. We celebrate surviving our first year as a Community Supported Music series with one of the most wonderful and outrageous bands from Latin America — Meridian Brothers. Plus special guests! DJ Bongohead spins tropical vinyl. Afropopfuturist Lollise (Fela! Band, Underground System) comes up from Brooklyn. Essential show.
ELECTRONIC TROPICAL ROOTS FREAK-OUT. The Meridian Brothers — Eblis Álvarez’s creative combo from Colombia — has no brothers in it, actually. Ween or Beck come to mind as the closest musical analogues here: weird and unafraid and endlessly creative. Björk, Kraftwerk and Radiohead are also inspirations. Over the years, his group has cemented into one of the most legendary underground bands of Latin America.
The tropical Bogota five-piece draws from an encyclopedic familiarity with Lat Am popular music, from cumbia to salsa to vallenato, to produce psychedelic, synthed-out pastiches — trad roots gone to outer space. Their constant experimentation is re-inventing Colombian music for the next century. And above all, they’re just trying to have fun.
MOVIMIENTO NEO-TROPICALISTA. The past several years have seen the Meridian Brothers release a trilogy of albums, each of which puts futuristic flourishes and avant weirdness to a different genre of Latin American music: “Cumbia Siglo XXI”, “Paz en la Tierra,” and “El Grupo Renacimiento” took on cumbia, vallenato, and salsa, respectively.
Following this creative crush of material, the band has been touring pretty relentlessly, pulling together material from these albums and older classics into a dance-forward setlist that veers around Colombian music like a UFO snapping up the most fantastic sounds in its tractor beam.
LOLLISE is a musician, visual artist and fashion designer from Botswana, currently living in NYC. Using sound, color and movement, Lollise tells stories of real and imagined worlds, multidimensional and nuanced, historical and futuristic.
After many years of recording and touring with Akoya Afrobeat, Underground System and the FELA! band, Lollise shares her own bold Afro-futurist pop sound, rich with analog synths, layers of percussion and gentle waves of ambient noise, with influences from '80s and '90s South African bubblegum and kwaito with new wave and art-pop: Afro-future soul, future roots, genreless Afro music.
DJ BONGOHEAD of the Peace & Rhythm collective spins vinyl before, between and after the live sets with the very best underground dance mashers from his formidable tropical collection.
