La Santa Cecilia will be performing at Amoeba San Francisco on Thursday, May 5th in celebration of their latest release, Trienta Dias.

There are two videos that caught my interest of late, dealing with the subject of immigration. One is overt and the other, a bit subtle. The first is a video from La Santa Cecilia from their new album, Treinta Dias. The song "El Hielo" (ICE) The video shows the daily lives of various undocumented immigrants as they go on their daily routine of getting ready for work and school, living in the shadows in order not to be detected. The tension of the workers as they watch the news of  ICE raids and look at photos of loved ones left behind weigh heavy on their faces. It also shows an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officer also getting ready for work. It's not the usual face one puts on the Immigration officers, rather the new faces of first or second generation Mexican Americans who often work in deporting immigrants. The tension of the video comes to the climax at the end when the work place of several of the immigrants is raided by the ICE force, who look just like the immigrants themselves.
 

From the April Fools' Dept...

It is now official.

The entire vinyl collection of one of the greatest DJs of our time is going on sale today at Amoeba Hollywood. Internationally known DJ, Cut Chemist, decided to sell his entire record collection a few weeks back to Amoeba Hollywood. The collection is approximately 40 thousand LPs, 12s, 45s and acetates, which has been hidden in the Amoeba warehouse underneath stacks of clearance DVD's so that no employees would get to them before the public. Also, as part of the agreement that Amoeba has with Cut Chemist, we agreed that would keep the sale of his collection a secret until today. This was done at Cut's request, so that everyone would get an equal chance at buying these records with no special preferences given to employees, famous DJs or private collectors.

As you can imagine, the collection is immense, with every record you could ever want from any genre you can name. Rare funk 45s, first edition Reggae and Hip-Hop records, obscure private press Free Jazz and folk LPs, International records from Africa, Brazil and Colombia, with every great Salsa, Cumbia and Afro-Beat record ever made. Also many first edition punk/post punk and goth records (which I didn't know he collected) and every collectible soundtrack, prog and psyche LPs that one could ever want. About seventy five percent of these records that I saw would go for hundreds of dollars on E-Bay, and this is just the first few crates into this incredible collection!

The name, El Haru Kuroi, is a cultural mash-up.It's a mix of grammatically incorrect Japanese and Spanish. They wanted to be called “Black Spring” in Japanese (It should be Kuroi Haru) and the “El” was added when people said they should have a Spanish name to their band because the band's lyrics were mostly in Spanish. Their latest release, Canta Gallo, is nothing short of brilliant. The influences that make El Haru Kuroi are not hard to pinpoint, yet put together they way they do makes for a sound that is all their own. The influence of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement weighs heavy on them, yet much like those artists involved in that movement, El Haru Kuroi adapted the music they grew up on and took the essence. The result is a haunting mixture of Bossa Nova and Boleros mixed with urgency of post-punk groups like Gang Of Four and Fugazi.

Singer/Guitarist Eddika Organista is the daughter of a Mexican musician who played in many Tropical groups. Most of the music Eddika’s father enjoyed was in Spanish, but he was also a fan of Brazilian music, Bossa Nova in particular. The sound of the Brazilian artists singing in Portuguese resonated strongly with a young Eddika, who was already fluent in both Spanish and English and playing guitar by age eleven. She found herself mimicking the sound of Brazilian singers when she sang. This led her to study Portuguese in school. She started to discover other Brazilian artists that went beyond the Bossa Nova singers that her father favored. At the age of seventeen, she is discovered the Tropicalia movement that started in Brazil in the late 60’s and in particular, her world was blown wide open by the discovery of Caetano Veloso. The influence of Veloso’s work on Eddika’s songwriting and musicianship is undeniable, but it goes beyond imitation. She manages to capture the soul of Caetano rather than his sound, the mixture of beauty and darkness that permeates her songs whether she is writing in English, Spanish or Portuguese.Organista's ability to sing in three languages creates options for the group. Language becomes part of the music, with each language chosen for what works best in the song. The rhythm section of Dominic Rodriguez and Michael Ibarra adapt to the whims of Organista’s imagination. Rodriguez imaginative percussive style works with Organista’s gritty yet breezy guitar tone. Ibarra hold them all together with a playing that resembles Charles Mingus when he played support rather than lead. It was an underrated talent of Mingus and one that Ibarra shares with him.  Lyrically, Organista’s metaphoric lyrics recall the beauty and pain of Caetano Veloso and Agustin Lara writing without imitation. Each song is pure heartbreak blues, even when decorated in sweet melodies.