Discos Rolas is an independent record label and creative collaboration founded by multidisciplinary artist Gary Garay (Ganas) and anthropologist Alexandra Lippman (Xandão) in 2018. Since then, they’ve fostered musical connections within Latin America and beyond.
Next Saturday, August 24th, on the heels of their successful season finale last year, Discos Rolas will return to the Grand Performances stage to present a celebration of the cumbia diaspora featuring Chucho Ponce y Los Daddys, Yeison Landero, Turbo Sonidero, and DJ Chihuahua. All summer, Grand Performances has presented a series of free outdoor concerts, poetry, theater and dance in downtown Los Angeles. From iLe and Dirty Dozen Brass Band to Daymé Arocena and a Celia Cruz tribute, Grand Performances has continued to inspire community, celebrate diversity, and unite Los Angeles through free access to global performing arts. Get familiar with the organization here.
To gear up for the set, which you can learn more about here, Discos Rolas has put together a special playlist, Kumbia en Movimiento. Cumbia is the biggest musical movement in Las Américas. From San Jacinto to Quito, Mexico City to Los Angeles, Puebla to Brooklyn, its growth and movement is organic, local and driven by working class sound systems and sonideros, record collectors and dealers, musicians, and, most importantly, fans. Cumbia isn’t pop, and its success has nothing to do with the mainstream, major label, or global capital. From keyboard driven cumbia poblana, to digital, synthy editada, pitched down rebajada, and the traditional accordions of Colombia, cumbia’s permutations are dynamic and alive. Their playlist highlights this sonic diversity focusing on their releases, parties, and collaborators.
We sat down with them ahead of the show to hear more about what gets them grooving. Hit shuffle on the playlist and get to know Discos Rolas:
TIGRE SOUNDS: Tell us about your musical genre identity and the type of sounds that move you.
DISCO ROLAS: We release the diasporic music from Latin America that we want to DJ and dance to and music that we want to hear and to preserve on vinyl and cassette. Cumbia, especially, moves us in its infinite regional and stylistic variations—like sonidera (sound system) from Mexico City like Grupo Kual, pitched down rebajada from Monterrey, and keyboard and synth-driven Puebla style like Grupo Soñador.
TIGRE SOUNDS: How are you helping to build the music culture in your scene or city?
DISCO ROLAS: Not only do we do what one might expect of a record label like releasing records and organizing shows, but we also build music culture in Los Angeles and more globally through radio, artist talks, documentary screenings, conferences, and long-term creative projects with visual artists, designers, and musicians. Our events and releases tend to generate energy that bursts into multiple activities, iterations, and ongoing collaborations.
For example, in 2018 our first event as Discos Rolas we organized a book release and artist conversation, followed by a dance party. We invited Mirjam Wirz, a Swiss photographer based in San Jacinto, Colombia and Mexico City, to release Ojos Suaves, her book about a key but underappreciated record dealer, Morelos, who has traveled throughout Central and South America in search of records for Mexican sonideros. We invited Ángel Pedraza of Grupo Kual (who happened to be in town on tour from Mexico City), Tony Fantasma a Los Angeles-based sonidero, and Mirjam’s collaborator Tropicaza to participate in a conversation on the book. Afterwards we threw a Más Exitos dance party where Tropicaza, Turbo Sonidero, Ganas and Xandão DJed records back-to-back. And, the next day, Ganas invited everyone to his show on Dublab for further conversations and DJ sets.
We’ve continued our multifaceted practice and bring our own backgrounds and expertise in art and anthropology to what we do. Last year Gary Garay was one of the Los Angeles artists invited to participate in the Made in LA biennial at the Hammer Museum. As part of his installation, Gary curated a series of artist talks, screenings, and dance parties in the museum with writers, artists, DJs, and filmmakers from Mexico City, LA, and elsewhere. Alexandra produced a radio documentary “Cumbia Sonidera on Broadway” about how downtown LA became a hub for the diasporic Mexican music industry in the mid 2000s with LA’s Metro Art and dublab’s DEEP ROUTES. She also co-organized a two day conference (the first of its kind in the US) “Listening to Cumbia,” with David Novak, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCSB, with a the US film premiere of Joyce García’s documentary Yo No Soy Guapo and Alvaro Parra’s Sonidero Metropolis and talks by filmmakers, designers, artists, DJs, and scholars. It was probably the first academic conference to end with an outdoor party DJ’d by the conference participants!
TIGRE SOUNDS: Which genre-bending artists are you really excited about right now?
DISCO ROLAS: Discos Rolas really started out of our mutual admiration for how Turbo Sonidero pushes the genre of cumbia into the future. We were blown away by his project Grupo Jejeje (with Iranian-British producer Arabalero). In search of esoteric sounds in the universe of cumbia, the two producers imagined a cosmic encounter between Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Meso-American cultures in what they call “Cyber Aztlán.”
For his latest album, Lowrider Kumbias, Turbo Sonidero remixes Chicano oldies—music for lowriders—with cumbia the music of his parents creating a hybrid honoring his heritage from Mexico City and Puebla with his Chicano identity growing up in East Side San Jose. Ganas worked with designer Roberto Rodriguez and his Local Offices design collective on stunning album art to pay respects to the aesthetic of bootleg Chicano oldies cassette tapes. Writer Hua Hsu selected Lowrider Kumbias for his “Year in Listening” for his ten favorite albums for the New Yorker.
TIGRE SOUNDS: What song are you listening to on repeat?
DISCO ROLAS: As we’re getting ready for our show at Grand Performances, we’ve been revisiting Chucho Ponce Los Daddy’s deep catalog and have fallen in love all over again with “Momento Enamorado,” which is a cover of “Moments in Love” by Art of Noise. I think I first heard this back in 2009 at Wildness (a party thrown by Total Freedom, Nguzunguzu, and Wu Tsang) and then on Nguzunguzu’s “Moments in Love” megamix of covers. “Momento Enamorado” is such an unexpected song that doesn’t seem like it should work but it just does!
TIGRE SOUNDS: What epic live shows or projects do you have coming up that we should look out for?
DISCO ROLAS: We’re bringing together a ridiculously stacked lineup for the season finale of Grand Performances in Downtown LA on August 24th. We invited Chucho Ponce Los Daddy’s from Puebla, Mexico Yeison Landero from Colombia, DJ Chihuahua from New York City, Turbo Sonidero from San Jose, and Sonidero Sabotaje from Monterrey, Mexico, and us, Ganas and Xandão, with Mextape as our MC. The show showcases the global diasporic movements that make cumbia the biggest sound in Latin America.
Each of the artists’ life stories tells some of the history of cumbia. Hailing from the village of San Jacinto in Colombia, Yeison Landero continues the legacy of his grandfather, Andres Landero the “King of Cumbia” who was the most important accordionist, singer, and songwriter from the 20th century. From Monterrey, Mexico, Sonidero Sabotaje represents and works closely with the creator of cumbia rebajada—dramatically pitched down Colombian (and South American) cumbia—Sonido Dueñez in Monterrey, Mexico. Both born in NYC, Chucho Ponce and DJ Chihuahua are products of the diasporic Puebla York. While Chucho moved from Brooklyn to his father’s village in Puebla to pursue becoming a cumbia musician and founding Los Daddy’s, DJ Chihuahua produces parties and music reflecting and expanding what it means to be from Puebla York. And, Turbo Sonidero, represents the importance of California and Chicano culture to the living culture of cumbia.
Last year we brought Grupo Kual?! from Mexico City to headline our finale at Grand Performances and drew the largest public they’ve ever seen with about 7,000 people from the community. This year, we’re raising the bar and inviting our dream lineup that you would never get the chance to see perform together anywhere else. And, it’s outside, all-ages, and free!
ABOUT DISCO ROLAS
Discos Rolas is an independent record label and creative ethnographic collaboration founded by multidisciplinary artist Gary Garay (Ganas) and anthropologist Alexandra Lippman (Xandão) in 2018. They foster musical and sonic connections within Latin America through album releases, screenings, dance parties, artist talks, and long-term collaborations with artists, designers, photographers, and musicians. They release music on vinyl and cassette with artists including Turbo Sonidero, Grupo Kual?, Grupo Soñador, Grupo Jejeje, Sonido Dueñez, and others. They also work with visual artists and designers including Roberto Rodriguez, Jaime Ruelas, and Local Offices. In 2020, they released the short documentary “Grupo Kual? Música de Barrio” on the Pedraza family’s multi-generational legacy as pioneers and innovators in cumbia in Mexico City. Their work has been featured in the New Yorker, FADER, Vogue Mexico, and elsewhere.
Cover photo by Farah Sosa courtesy of Grand Performances