Sonido Gallo Negro
Mambo Cosmico

Sonido Gallo Negro is a nine-member combo from the massive urban area of Mexico City, and "Mambo Cosmico" is their third LP, already released at the end of 2017 in South America and set to be published on Glitterbeat on April 6th. The group has been around since 2011 and has already achieved some recognition in the USA and Europe, where in 2012 they were invited to take part in the Kustendorf Film and Music Festival organized by Emir Kusturica at the eponymous village on the Serbia-Bosnia border, which he built for his film "Life is a Miracle" (2004). Like Brian Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan's XIXA project (already collaborators of Howe Gelb), Sonido Gallo Negro primarily reinterprets traditional sounds and features of the Latin American continent mixed with acid psychedelia and surf music, but their musical proposal is broader and richer with Amazonian colorations and frantic rhythms on the verge of "tragedy," as the tradition told in the plots of South American telenovelas.

After starting with genres like Amazonian cumbia, huayno, chicha, boogaloo, Sonido Gallo Negro opened their horizons to musical riffs typical of mambo, porro, danzon, and cha cha cha. Not forgetting the repertoire of spaghetti western sounds, which have now become part of the repertoire of groups within the USA psychedelic scene like Spindrift and Federale. "Mambo Cosmico" is a true acid experience, a psychedelic trip that literally drags the listener from the first track into a kind of merry-go-round that never stops spinning until the end inside an amusement park owned by Aldous Huxley. If we exclude "Danza del Mar" (which will remind listeners of a certain Manu Chao verve) and the Aztec shamanism of "Cambia de Sanacion," the album is completely instrumental: the "repertoire" also includes revisited versions of two super-classics like "Tolu" by Lucho Bermudez and "Quien Sera" by Pablo Beltran Ruiz.

Dominated by the wild sound of the Farfisa organ, accompanied by electric guitars, theremin, flute, and clearly percussion from the Latin American tradition, the sound of Sonido Gallo Negro is kaleidoscopic and (perhaps overly) folkloristic and at the same time absolutely noisy and unpredictable. Forget in any case any atmosphere that might make you think of the warm and reassuring bossa nova or group dances, because here we are faced with a real group of madmen whose sound is as loud as the gunshots and screams of villistas in Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916.