Digital Cumbia

What it is

Zizek Club opened in a bar in Buenos Aires in 2006, running a night for producers who had grown up with cumbia villera on the radio and dubstep on their hard drives. What came out of it, and out of the ZZK label that followed, keeps the llamador and the guacharaca exactly where a Colombian record has them and replaces everything else: an 808 or a sampled sub under the bombo, digital delay on the flute, and arrangements that breathe like electronic music rather than like a band. Chancha Via Circuito slowed it further and drenched it in reverb, El Remolon and Frikstailers pulled it toward the club, and within a few years there were people doing the same thing to cumbia in Mexico City, Lima, Bogota and Berlin.

What it sounds like

Deep and hazy. The low end is a synthesised sub with a long tail, tuned rather than sampled, sitting far below where a bombo actually lives. Percussion is sampled from old records and left slightly noisy: a llamador with tape hiss on it, a guacharaca that loops audibly. Flutes and accordions arrive through long reverbs and pitch-shifted delays, often reversed. There is a lot of empty space in the middle of the mix. Vocals, when there are any, are fragments of a sampled record repeated and filtered. Everything sits behind the beat rather than on top of it.

Key elements

• The llamador survivesThe offbeat drum is the one thing carried across unchanged. Take it out and the track is a slow beat with some flutes on it, not a cumbia.
• A sub instead of a bomboThe big drum is replaced by a tuned sine with a long decay, so the low end becomes a note rather than a thump and the bassline and the drum are the same object.
• Slower than the sourceAround 90 rather than 100, which pulls the offbeat further from the beat and gives the whole rhythm a drag that a coastal ensemble would never play.
• Sampled percussion, left roughThe guacharaca and the alegre come off records rather than out of a kit, with the hiss and the room of the original still attached.
• Space as an instrumentLong reverbs and delays on everything melodic while the drums stay dry and close. That contrast is most of the production.

How to get them

• SubA sine at 45 to 55Hz with a 400 millisecond decay and a little saturation above 150Hz so it survives on a phone. Tune it to the root and let it be the bassline as well as the drum.
• LlamadorSample a real offbeat drum rather than using a conga preset, keep whatever room came with it, and place it dead on the offbeat eighths at a constant velocity.
• GuacharacaThe lane exports as a guiro, note 74, which is as near as GM gets; a guacharaca is a different and drier instrument, so load one if you have it. Sixteenths, high-passed at 900Hz, with a short slap delay panned opposite. Loop two bars rather than programming every hit.
• Melodic partsPitch a flute or accordion sample down two or three semitones, send it to a reverb of four seconds or more, then high-pass the return at 500Hz so the low end stays clear.
• Keep the drums dryNo reverb at all on the percussion bus. The whole style depends on close, dry drums against a very wet everything else, and reverb on both flattens it.
• Tempo92 or lower. If it starts sounding like a coastal record you have gone too fast; if the offbeat starts feeling like halftime you have gone too slow.

Reference points

ZZK Records and Zizek Club, Chancha Via Circuito, El Remolon, Frikstailers, King Coya, Tremor, Nicola Cruz, and the cumbia villera records they grew up on. Named as reference points, not as endorsements.