By Marlon Bishop
March 1, 2013

The people have spoken, and they have good taste -  Colombia’s Meridan Brothers – an experimental tropical band from Colombia – is our artist of the week.

As is custom here, we got in touch with winning bandleader Eblis Álvarez for an interview, in which he went into depth about his creative process, his relationship with sound and polyrhythm, and the electrifying nature of Bogota’s underground music scene.  As we have long suspected – turns out that it’s f**king awesome. Read on to find out how a generation of young, adventurous musicians discovered that Afro-Colombian traditional music was the bomb.

We called you the most interesting man in Colombia – is it true? 

That’s pretty flattering but, if I am, I am only one of the “most interesting” men in Colombia. There are a lot of interesting artists/musicians here in our country in the music scene and I think everyone influences with each other in a lot of ways. My musical language belongs to this scene.

Your music is extremely weird (in a good way!) What inspires you?

I have heard that from some people. The project began in a very personal environment without any pretention to get into a certain industry or aesthetic, so I moved freely with my ideas. On the other hand I didn’t sell many copies of our early albums. We were also banned from some radio stations here in Bogotá, and our participation in festivals was criticized.

When did you discover that you wanted to work with cumbia and Afro-Colombian music?

The decision to work with tropical, Afro-Colombian genres has emerged gradually among my musician friends over the years. We have been experimenting with these genres since the ’90s. The first time I used them was in  Duo Latin Lover,  a very bizarre cassette band I had with my friend Javier Morales in 1996.

After that I joined the Ensamble Polifónico Vallenato  a punk-noise ensemble using vallenato music as a core material. By this time tropical music wasn’t trendy at all, and the project was deeply criticized. From these early experiments, not ours but other collectives as well such as Curupira and La Mojarra Electrica, the use of roots music emerged in the scene as well in my own music.

You get a lot of vintage sounds, lots of old organs and stuff – where do you find them?

I am very inspired by a lot of vintage keyboard/synth instruments, from the theremin, the Hammond, the Ondes Martenot. I like the sounds you find in old UFO films and musique concrete from the ’50s. I’m very fond of Ligeti’s early synth-tape works as well as Stockhausen’s electronic music from the ’50s.

I also hear a lot of playing around with rhythm in unconventional ways. Tell me about that.

In my music I’ve been very obsessed with polyrhythms. I think this tendency came from Juan Sebastian Monsalve, one of my teachers and bandmates in the ’90s. He’s the co-founder and leader of Curupira, a band with a very deep impact here in Bogotá. He went went to India in the late ’90s with Urian Sarmiento, another big influence for me, and they brought back a lot of rhythmic influences they combined with Colombian sounds. It amazed me very deeply. I decided to follow their steps both composing and playing. Some years later, I sort of followed my own path investigating the effect of polyrhythms in the perception of music.

I applied these techniques to the music I was composing, mainly for new contemporary music ensembles. Writing out this music was really difficult to read even for trained muscians. some of them were really angry at me when they played my music. But after a few years of playing it, I got very used to this specific type of writing and decided to use it in the songs of Meridian Brothers. It changed the rhythmic shape of the music.

How did studying classical music impact your creative process?

It left a deep impact. Most of my training comes from the classical and jazz school, and my way of composing comes out of classical method. The last few years, I’ve been playing a lot of cumbia and salsa, just for myself, and I have discovered a whole new world in those styles. I think one is never done with learning!

You’ve played in a lot of bands in Colombia – does everybody just play in everybody else’s bands? What’s the vibe like? 

Sort of. Some musicians do that for living, others just for fun. The underground jazz/popular music scene Bogotá is not very big. There are a few bars where you can play, and you see the same people over and over again, so everybody plays in their friends’ projects and also runs their own groups. So the amount of music produced is massive. There is a release nearly every week in Bogotá, and much of the music is really interesting.

How did the album with Soundway Records come about?

I gave my album Desesperanza to them while I was on a trip to London. I guess they liked it and asked me if they could release it. A lot of good things came after the promotion they did, I’m very happy to have signed with them. I had been following their releases before and I didn’t imagine they would put out my work.

Ok – time to come clean. Who are these “brothers”? 

We are a crew of six. I will describe each one because they are very special musicians, each playing an important role in the development of the band.

What’s next for the Meridi