MERIDIAN BROTHERS + LOLLISE
MERIDIAN BROTHERS + LOLLISE
Season Finale! Friday, May 10
Meridian Brothers + Lollise + DJ Bongohead
AT THE IRON HORSE (!!!) in NORTHAMPTON
7:30PM (doors 7PM)
ELECTRONIC TROPICAL ROOTS FREAK-oUT
The Meridian Brothers — Eblis Álvarez’s creative combo from Colombia — has no brothers in it, actually. Ween or Beck come to mind as the closest musical analogues here: weird and unafraid and endlessly creative. Björk, Kraftwerk and Radiohead are also inspirations. Over the years, his group has cemented into one of the most legendary underground bands of Latin America.
The tropical Bogota five-piece draws from an encyclopedic familiarity with Lat Am popular music, from cumbia to salsa to vallenato, to produce psychedelic, synthed-out pastiches — trad roots gone to outer space. Their constant experimentation is re-inventing Colombian music for the next century. And above all, they’re just trying to have fun.
MOVIMIENTO NEO-TROPICALISTA
The past several years have seen the Meridian Brothers release a trilogy of albums, each of which puts futuristic flourishes and avant weirdness to a different genre of Latin American music: “Cumbia Siglo XXI”, “Paz en la Tierra,” and “El Grupo Renacimiento” took on cumbia, vallenato, and salsa, respectively.
Following this creative crush of material, the band has been touring pretty relentlessly, pulling together material from these albums and older classics into a dance-forward setlist that veers around Colombian music like a UFO snapping up the most fantastic sounds in its tractor beam.
In 2023, the legendary group decided they wanted to pretend to be a fictitious salsa group from the 70s, a la Sgt. Peppers, leading to general post-truth confusion on stage. They released this “ficti-mentary” to explain their origin story.
SPECIAL GUESTS! LOLLISE & DJ BONGOHEAD
Well, it’s our season finale. We had to invite some friends.
Lollise is a musician, visual artist and fashion designer from Botswana, currently living in NYC. Using sound, color and movement, Lollise tells stories of real and imagined worlds, multidimensional and nuanced, historical and futuristic.
After many years of recording and touring with Akoya Afrobeat, Underground System and the FELA! band, Lollise shares her own bold Afro-futurist pop sound, rich with analog synths, layers of percussion and gentle waves of ambient noise, with influences from '80s and '90s South African bubblegum and kwaito with new wave and art-pop: Afro-future soul, future roots, genreless Afro music.
And add to the mix our near and dear friend Pablo Yglesias AKA DJ Bongohead from Peace & Rhythm for deep cuts from everywhere, before between and after the live sets. This is going to be a night to remember.
