Cumbia was the flavor of this weekend's mixtape for Sound Travels and I decided to get a lil niche-ey with it. As a cumbia lover, and one who is still learning its intricacies, I had been finding what I thought were one-off oddities until I realized there were simply too many super-slowed cumbia cuts for it not to be a thing.
As it turns out, I was right and that the practice of slowing cumbia records down is definitely done on purpose. A thing that really got it's mojo from sonideros in Monterrey, Mexico who found the speeds on some of the Colombian cumbias to be a bit too fast and (probably accidentally) discovered that a super fast cumbia also sounds dope pitched way farther down. And thus was cumbia rebajada born! These days, new cumbias are being produced at a deliberately slow pace in a way that mimics the slowed down effect as inspiration rather than innovation.
This mix is a combination of those newer and older works and re-works as well as a few from my collection played in that rebajada, or slowed down style. Cool beans eh? Here's what an hour of it sounds like...
