Los Novios del Más Allá
Lo-fi, warm cumbia. EST. ERA 1970S
“Four sides about things that keep enlarging past the point anyone measured for them — a lapel, a ring, a dress form, a guest book — stitched with whatever color was left in the box.”
Every album Los Novios del Más Allá appears on — their own records, the sessions and tapes they played on, and the record they brought with them.
Los Novios del Más Allá emerged from a crumbling dancehall in Bogotá's Barrio Egipto in 1973, when organist Efraín Cuartas began playing wedding sets for families who couldn't afford live bands — and, according to neighborhood legend, for the recently departed too. The collective grew to nine members, trading Farfisa organ, timbales, güira, tremolo-drenched guitar and a horn section always a quarter-tone flat. They recorded onto a battered two-track in a funeral parlor after hours, letting candle-smoke and cheap tape saturation bleed into every take. Their shows blurred grief and fiesta: mourners danced until dawn while the band improvised for hours at a loping 111 bpm. Deliberately out of tune and defiantly joyful, they turned the wake into a wedding and made the underworld swing.
“If it never hissed, it never happened.”
The Critic hears every release and says whether it was any good. This is their word on Los Novios del Más Allá.
Nothing yet — the Critic speaks after each release. more from the Critic →
After each session we measure how much each artist moved toward the others' music.