adrian martinez chavez

Cumbias, Cumbias, y Mas Cumbias, is a functional DJ booth equipped with two turntables, a mixer, and a large multi-speaker sound system. This piece draws from my family's origins in Monterrey, and their engagement with its Cumbia and Sonidero culture and history. This socially engaged piece is meant to replicate a musical experience my family and many others would have had in Latin America going back to the 1950’s.

This work is dependent on a viewer’s participation in dancing in the same way my family members would have enjoyed Cumbia music when they arrived in the US from Mexico. Mixes of Cumbia music are played by me live with vinyl records I've been accumulating from the Northeast of the US to South of Mexico. The act of acquiring, archiving, preserving, and spinning records from Mexico is an attempt to give them a new life in the US after they too have migrated. Records from Latin American record labels like Discos Fuentes, Discos Peerless, and Discos Toka are combined with contemporary labels such as Discos Resaca, Discos Rolas and Discos Más, in an effort to blend together time, place and sound. I am interested in the intersection of this work being an installation and a functioning audio system that resembles something my family would set up in the living room of our house many years ago with music that would have been played at that time. The mixes are also recorded and then shared online via SoundCloud.

Cumbias, Cumbias, y Mas Cumbias, has been installed and activated at Yale University, AMANITA NY, and at the Cactus Store, NY, in collaboration with All Pib Slow Play.