A NECESSARY SONIC DISSIDENCE

By Iván Benavides.

There is good music and bad music; there is commercial music and alternative music; there are many "posers" and many "wannabes"; there exists "a lot of noise and few chestnuts". But there is also music that beyond being "pretty", is "needed", and La Distritofonica is a major source of creativity and new sonorities which are so necessary for a country that, if looked at superficially, seems to have only two ubiquitous pop mega-stars, and a few "celebrated" musicians: celebrate and celebrate!

García Márquez said at the end of last century that our (Colombian) mark is excess. Our thing in the 21st century would be then the hang-over, a consequence of the intoxication for those indulgences. We suffer of a sort of cultural schizophrenia, we live between carnival and tragedy, in a country that does not learn to dialogue because it has not learnt to listen either. Amid this desolate landscape it is astonishing, to say the least, that someone would be bold enough to be the sonic dissidence, to advance an aesthetic far from the commercial and academic machineries.

Surrounded by most of our mass music's poverty where a lot of artists seem like clones and all the songs are like one, the artists of La Distritofonica are also far from the "identity" discourses by the purists of Colombian music, and far from the canons of "Cultured" music. They dare to make sonic projects that are risky and radical, to break the boundaries between genres, to walk on the tightrope and transit paths that are not safe, to create new languages, to inhabit the crossroads, to give birth to yet-unborn mestizo sonorities, to provoke us, to invite us to an attentive listening experience in order to feel and understand the world in another way, as the true artists of all times do.