Review
Genre and Mood
Nicola Cruz takes a cumbia at a laid-back pace on Cumbia del Olvido, an electronic track that is also downtempo and folk-rooted world music. The feelings come from the sources: hypnotic and relaxed, after the “hypnotic and laid back” rhythm section one reviewer heard; nostalgic, after Cruz’s own description of the track as a nostalgic mantra of letting go.
Song Summary
Cumbia del Olvido, the cumbia of forgetting, is the fourth of ten tracks on Prender el Alma, Cruz’s debut album, released by ZZK Records on 30 October 2015, and runs 3:36. In a track-by-track for The Ransom Note, Cruz called it “green as dub”, a misty, smoky environment, and a perfect tune for having a few beers and forgetting past love affairs. He recorded it with Rodrigo Capello on guitar; the album, by ZZK’s account, he self-produced and self-recorded, building each track layer by layer, instrument by instrument, drum by drum.
Musical Breakdown
The sources describe the track’s textures rather than its sections, so this breakdown follows them.
Main Section
Tonewood heard reverberated, carefully plucked strings echoing against a rhythm section that is hypnotic and laid back, yet authoritative, and compared the whole to the sun-baked ravings of chilled-out 1970s psychedelia. The guitar is Capello’s.
Outro
No source describes how the track ends. Sounds and Colours heard the album’s songs unfold like movements, with new instrumentation every few seconds, so listen for what has arrived or left by the final bars.
Concepts in Focus
dub began in Jamaica as a way of remixing a record: stripping it to drums and bass and treating everything else with echo and drop-outs. When Cruz calls this track green as dub, in the same breath as a misty, smoky environment, he seems to mean that sense of space and haze rather than reggae itself; the title still names a cumbia.
reverb is the sound of a space, the reflections that linger after a note. On Cumbia del Olvido the reviewer heard it on the guitar: plucked strings, “reverberated”, echoing against the rhythm section. Reverb of that kind is one way a few notes can make a track feel distant and nostalgic, like something half-remembered.
Artistic Context
Cruz, who works from a studio in Tumbaco, Ecuador, began as a drummer, playing Megadeth covers at twelve, before turning to electronic music. Remezcla tells how a slow, soulful track he sent to Nicolas Jaar’s label Clown & Sunset led Jaar to invite him to make more music and take him on tour; the Jaar of Nicolas Jaar – Time For Us shares this track’s patience. On Prender el Alma he named his style Andes Step, Ecuadorian folklore mixed with electronic music, exploring, in ZZK’s words, local indigenous and Afro-cosmologies in a modern setting.
Impact and Reception
Sounds and Colours called Prender el Alma a genre-bending new classic, and Remezcla greeted it on the day of its release as a tale of Ecuador’s musical spirit. Put it on at the end of an evening and let it do what Cruz said it was for.
