Order In The Mix

Protest rap from Kenya, shoegaze from Costa Rica, and cumbia from everywhere

Lots from Latin America this month, from cumbia to metal to post-punk—with a bit of synth pop thrown in for good measure. Mixmag makes a strong return to form with scene reports on house music in Asia and Africa, Bandcamp is as active as ever, and a new compilation album has everyone talking about Iranian pop from the 80s.

As always, scroll down to find an album highlight, a round-up of scene reports from this month, and (for paid subscribers) a custom playlist with one song pulled from each scene report.

The Album:

Francisca Valenzuela, Buen Soldado (Chile): Light but sharp-hooked piano-driven pop from Chilean indie’s Cambrian days.

The Reports:

1. In 2024, mass protests in Kenya ended with 60 people dead, most at the hands of the state. In his monthly Music In Africa column, Rolling Stone’s Mankapr Conteh writes about how this tragedy catalyzed a new wave of protest rap across the East African country.

2. In the first installment of Mixmag’s three-part series on contemporary evolutions in African house music, Shiba Melissa Mazaza pens a blockbuster of an essay on the history and cultural tension behind the 3-Step sub-genre that’s become a dominant force on club floors across the continent.

3. Henry Cooper also contributed a piece to Mixmag on Cambodia’s hard-won success at building an electronic music scene after the country’s cultural communities were hollowed out by the Khmer Rouge.

4. I’m somewhat late to this, but it seems that Richard Villegas has a new column in the Southwest Review about music scenes across Latin America, told with his signature mix of regional context, personal storytelling, and rapid-fire hyperlinks. Looks like he’s published four so far, with the latest diving into Chilé’s fabled indie pop scene.

5. Defending his unofficial title as one of the most prolific music writers around, Richard Villegas also wrote a piece for Bandcamp exploring the influence of shoegaze, post-punk, and other melancholic sounds in sunny Central America.

6. Another Bandcamp regular, James Gui, looks at Japans’ minyo revival and asks whether the resurgence of Japanese folk music is really as recent a phenomenon as people think.

7. Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky put together a stunning photo series for NPR on the various manifestations of cumbia across the Spanish-speaking world, with separate dispatches from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and Ecuador, and even Los Angeles. Bonus points if you can find the customer playlist they tease in their header article (I haven’t been able to track it down).

8. Grammy.com tapped Stephanie Mendez for a well-sourced piece on heavy metal’s history in Latin America and that genre’s co-development with the region’s very real struggles against government oppression and military takeovers.

9. In the latest example of compilation coverage turning into a mini scene report, Katie Bain is in Billboard wrote about the diasporic Iranian musical community in 80s-era Los Angeles, which was recently resurfaced by the folks at Discotchari in their compilation album Tehrangeles Vice. (If you want to go even deeper, Bandcamp also wrote about the compilation in one of their Album of the Day features).

The Playlist: