The psych-cumbia fusion of Los Esplifs
Los Esplifs released their debut album on 4/20, a fitting launch date for the cumbia-psych band whose namesake comes from the Spanglish take on a spliff. With half weed and half tobacco, the two sides represent the duality of co-creators Saul Millan and Caleb Michel. Their work is a blend of playful and serious, a mix of their Hispanic roots and their life in the desert.
The first-generation duo, with Millan’s family hailing from Mexico and Michel’s the Dominican Republic, were joined by fellow Arizona musicians Chris Del Favero, Zach Parker, Casey Hadland, Alan Acosta and Gus Woodrow for ¡ESTRAIK BACK!, an album that oozes with the type of grooves to get your body moving. It sits in an area that your average concert-goer may find difficult to describe, especially when dance music is typically confined to electronic beats and guitars can feel stuck only existing within rock or singer-songwriter realms. It’s in this confusion where the magic seems to happen, where audience expectations are turned upside-down and they open themselves up to experiencing something new.
“The audience was just all audience members that had never listened to cumbia,” Millan reflects when thinking back to one of their early shows alongside Phoenix band Pro Teens. The crowd in front of them was majority white and, as they played, the musicians began to feel uncomfortable that nobody was dancing. “Nobody was understanding what was happening, and both Caleb and I would look at each other like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a train wreck. This is completely a train wreck, right?’ But then there was this clicking sense when the second song was coming in where everybody started dancing and started to remove their self-conscious like, ‘I’m at a show, I'm at an indie rock show so I'm swaying my hips real weird,’ you know? Everybody started to get rid of their super hipster like, ‘I’m at this place right now,’ and started just getting down. And I started realizing that the music had a way bigger power.”
This power, born out of the mixture of influences that they crafted, wound up transcending the self-imposed barrier that held people back during the first song. Millan even saw friends of his that he knew were super uncomfortable dancing dancing. A spark lit up within the venue, and they received confirmation that they were on the right track by trying something that was a mix of old and new. “It was amazing and I knew that it had a different sort of power over people that I've never at least experienced with any other music. And that's why I call it truly psychedelic cause I was experiencing something that I never experienced which was people really feeling comfortable which is part of psychedelics.”
He delves further into how this direction lends itself into an unexpected approach on the psychedelic experience: “For me, psychedelia and psychedelic music is an experiential music. So for a lot of the listeners, us speaking in Spanish is already psychedelic because they cannot understand what we're saying. I think that's a powerful thing, of people not really understanding what we're saying but understanding the music and really feeling the music. We've tried to make a point that we're not going to sing in English, ever. And when we're on stage we usually speak only in Spanish. Although we can speak in English, we only do it in Spanish because I think that that level of comfort and that level of really showing how we are in those spaces is a psychedelic experience within itself. People need to experience that.”
The band leans into that experience even further by intentionally booking alongside acts whose sounds are a departure from their own. “It's interesting because in the Southwest the big project that we have as a community project is to show this music and to normalize it and to also be part of the canon of universal music and not be treated as specifically niche Latino music. So when we're here in Arizona, in the Southwest, we book with indie bands and audience members who are specifically not from Latino backgrounds, that have never listened to this music because we're trying to make a point that this is a universal language type music, just like with rock'n'roll and everything like that. We make an emphasis to book in that specific way so people get introduced to a new world.”
Part of how the duo became enamored with this world of psychedelic cumbia was through Caleb Michel’s dad who grew up in New York during the rise and height of the esteemed Fania Records. He’s credited as being a walking library of that era and style of music and would teach them about the backgrounds of the various songs. He’d explain how the euphemisms weren’t just songwriting allegory and fictional storytelling but based on reflections of actual life and real people within the community. The music was deeply rooted in community stories, something they’re hoping to emulate for their community in Arizona. Their work has been able to be something special not just to audiences who view their sound as something completely new but also hits a note with those who connect to the heart of what they delve into, similar in a way to the fresh yet nostalgic connection they’ll uncover when playing shows in Mexico with audiences that have grown up to cumbia. “When I go to his house, we'll play ‘Perro Rabioso’ or something like outside with his congas and just like sing and stuff. He knows the music and he really likes it,” Millan shares. “It really is what he was looking for as an audience member [and] it's really cool that we could bring that and that we're just from a completely different era. That we can bring that to that specific listener, it’s really amazing.”
As for the album itself, the musicians put an incredible amount of thought into each track… even the ones that, on the surface, may come across as mainly tongue-in-cheek. “Perro Rabioso” was literally inspired by the fawning over a dog that was brought into a Phoenix bar. “Everyone around it was petting, holding, and even kissing its mouth, and we began to imagine all the horrible things that this dog could’ve been doing before being adored. In between laughs, we came to the realization that we were a lot like this dog,” they explained in a statement. Meanwhile, “Otro País,” written when Michel was laboring harder than ever before and still struggling to pay rent, places an upbeat track alongside a jest that even if you go to another country, or a different politician is in charge who claims it’s gonna get better, circumstances largely wind up being the same. Via Michel, “‘Otro País’ tackles the grass always-greener theme with dark humor and infectious rhythm.”
One track in particular that stands out is the initially haunting yet fully mesmerizing “Donde Esta El Monsoon?” The track works to replicate the uncomfortable dryness that came with not experiencing a monsoon season the year before. Los Esplifs bassist Del Favero, also a co-founder of nine-piece Jewish funk band Jerusafunk, came up with the idea of using a Gamelan scale as inspiration. “It has specific harmonic arrangement of what a scale is because of western tradition versus eastern tradition of what harmony is,” Millan explains on the direction of the song. “Then we started to incorporate other type of qualities that would make it more into our universe. What we decided to include in our textural universe is Gaita Colombiana. It's a specific flute instrument you can hear it at the top of the tune. So Chris Del Favero and myself played gaita on the whole track to create a more earthy type of western type of sound.” In addition to incorporating the South American instrument, they fused together the sound of a synth, guitar and violin to create a super instrument to play the melody. “The idea behind that was to create a new sound completely. We're all playing in unison. We're all playing the same thing - the violin, the synthesizer, and then guitar - and we're trying to create a new textural sound and melody line kind of like an abstract alien instrument.”
The album was recorded in three full sessions and unlike their EP, which was recorded digitally, the group recorded reel-to-reel, direct-to-tape with a Tascam 388. “I honestly tell every single musician that they should try it. It really challenges your musicianship and it really creates an amazing sound that is immediately recognizable,” Millan shares on the experience. “It's very hard to edit onto tape but it also gives you an essence of performance that you can't capture anywhere else.” There isn’t the visual reference like when working on a computer screen so most of the album is straight live takes of everything. It’s the closest one can get to the live experience sonically, and gives listeners the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the music before attending a live show.
As musicians who have been so heavily supported and inspired by members of their own community (Millan is part of Sergio Mendoza-led Orkesta Mendoza and Michel a performer with Juan de Marcos González’s Afro-Cuban All Stars), I ask if they have any plans to do the same for those coming in after them, but for now that role may be premature. “For us, we're still the babies,” Millan sheds light on with a laugh. “It's unfortunate that there's not younger kids making music or believing in themselves with seriousness to make records right now. And, you know, it's okay. I think that is gonna change [and] I'm very much looking forward to that.” One rising artist he can think of to plug is Glixen. “Glixen is really good. They just released this single. They're a shoegaze band from Phoenix and they're really amazing.”
Next for the duo and the rest of the band is a break from Los Esplifs while enduring the hot Arizona summer with plans to re-emerge in the fall to perform for their community then take their tracklisting on the road to other cities. In the meantime, they’ll have a video for “Galaxia” coming out by a visual artist from Arkansas that will be entirely Tucson-based and done via analog synthesis. If it’s anything like the visual feasts and journeys released so far from Cachora Films and Tasnim Boufelfel, we’ll be in for a real treat while eagerly awaiting the opportunity to celebrate ¡ESTRAIK BACK! in person in the fall.
