Various - The Roots of Chicha/Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru - 2 x Vinyl, LP, Compilation, Repress

Cultural phenomena traverse the collective consciousness like meteorites. They leave a significant, perhaps even life-changing, impact somewhere, but for many it is only a fleeting moment, soon swallowed up by the cosmos. Chicha could have been that. Instead, a once-obscure music that was fanatically embraced in the Peruvian slums of the 1970s has become a globally recognized event thanks to the sensational success of a 2007 CD called The Roots of Chicha. The album, released by Brooklyn-based label Barbès Records, was a passionate act of cultural appreciation: a powerful attempt to surprise the world with something it never expected to hear. It took listeners back to the late 1960s, when a number of Peruvian guitarists from Lima and the Amazon created a new electric hybrid that combined cumbia, surf, Cuban guaracha, rock, Peruvian folklore and psychedelic elements. This new wave of Peruvian cumbia became known as chicha. Despised by the middle class and official evaluators of taste, chicha remained primarily associated with the slums of Lima, where the ever-growing population of Andean migrants adopted the music and its performers as their own.