User:CameronNemo/sandbox

https://www.meridianbrothers.com


 * 1) discography / discografia
 * 2) press / prensa
 * 3) fotos / photos

https://www.discogs.com/artist/2037233-Meridian-Brothers

"led by Eblis Alvarez"

11 albums between 2006 and 2022.

https://www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2017/08/31/545284499/meridian-brothers-the-musical-madcaps-of-the-tropical-baroque

"Meridian Brothers evolved from a conceptual band where Eblis Alvarez, one of Colombia's most innovative experimental musicians, played all the instruments. A classical and jazz guitarist and graduate in composition from the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, Alvarez had moved on to explore tropical sounds in an electronic context at a time when he was also being influenced by artists such as Björk, Kraftwerk and Radiohead."

"Alvarez, as usual, composes and records all of Meridian Brothers' music (he brings together the band for live shows)."

2020 https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/meridian-brothers-cumbia-siglo-xxi-interview

"Eblis Álvarez, the primary personality behind Meridian Brothers"

"The sound of Meridian Brothers is deliberately hard to pin down. For Álvarez, each album is an excuse to venture into new sonic territory, from Desesperanza’s psych-salsa to the tropical punk of Salvadora Robot to the sweet tropicalia of ¿Dónde Estás María?."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jul/09/meridian-brothers-meridian-brothers-and-el-grupo-renacimiento-review-eblis-alvarez

"Meridian Brothers, the brainchild of Eblis Alvarez"

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/02/arts/music/meridian-brothers-el-grupo-renacimiento.html

"Or at least that’s what Eblis Álvarez, an academy-trained Colombian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, wants you to believe with the release of his new album, [...]. Meridian Brothers is a moniker Álvarez uses on many of his albums — “collaborations” with fictional bands, in this case Grupo Renacimiento. Although he plays all the instruments and handles all the vocals on the album, he also performs live with a regular Meridian Brothers Band that features four of his friends from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá."

"“Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento” has a stripped-down aesthetic, which is the essence of salsa itself — an uptown, urban genre born after the decline and fall of the flashy big-band Palladium Mambo era, much like punk arose in the wake of grandiloquent British progressive arena rock. Álvarez focuses most of his attention on a dubby, echoing psychedelic electric guitar and tinny keyboards, supplemented by a synched-in rhythm section of timbales and congas. You can hear hints of West African highlife and Congo-derived soukous, a hybrid of Cuban rumba."

"Álvarez, 45, has released more than 25 albums since 2005, some as Meridian Brothers and others under other names, all of which have poked, investigated and tried to tease out a sense of authenticity in Colombian music. Some, like “Paz en la Tierra” in 2021, focus on the traditional vallenato genre, a storytelling folk music popularized by Carlos Vives in the 1990s, while others fall into the category Álvarez calls “neo-tropical,” excavating rhythms like champeta, a Colombia analog to Caribbean dembow."

2022-08-03 https://www.grammy.com/news/meridian-brothers-new-album-explores-latin-music-with-irreverent-surrealist-lyrics

"According to Álvarez, the record has been taking shape over the last decade, while he considered playing salsa more seriously. "Ten years ago, we released Desesperanza, a record that had salsa elements but still carried some psychedelia, some electronica," he explains. "So this time, it was the other way around, I wanted to take the traditional sound, its lyrics, and fundamental expression, and bring them to modernity." "

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/06/1116135436/meridian-brothers-collaborate-with-an-imaginary-salsa-band-on-new-album

Interview with Alvarez.

"ALVAREZ: Well, so the story goes as follows. It was Artemio Morela (ph) and Walditrudis Urango (ph), a couple of guys living in Las Tinas, Magdalena, which is a small village in the north of Colombia. They wanted to try to go to Bogota and do music. And they used to have the influences of Italian ballads, for example, of the old soneros from Cuba and from New York. And once, they listened to the Lebron Brothers, which is a Puerto Rican band. And that made a click in the head of Artemio. He said that's the thing they want to do. So they decided to go into salsa."

"ALVAREZ: It's just this song since salsa singers in the '70s, they used to sing about, you know, like, actual problems - social problems, political problems, human problems of emotional problems. So I decide to imitate that attitude - "Metamorfosis" - that tells about this dystopian world where technology takes over the human brain, takes over the human body, takes over the human societies and control it."

"ALVAREZ: Well, I'm very fond of jibaro music, which is traditional music from Puerto Rico mainly done with the strings, with tres."


 * 1) Tiny Desk Concert

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/07/1186007375/meridian-brothers-tiny-desk-concert

"band leader Eblis Alvarez did not disappoint"

SET LIST

"Guaracha U.F.O." "¿Dónde Estás María?" "Bomba Atómica"

MUSICIANS

Eblis Javier Alvarez Vargas: guitar, keyboard, cello, vocals Alejandro Forero: keyboards Cesar Quevedo Barrero: bass María Angélica Valencia Sanchez: saxophone, percussion Mauricio Ramírez Echeverri: drums Alejandro Araujo Larrahondo: percussion, vocals