Cumbia de Las Almas Extrañas comes to us by way of a meeting between estranged talents from disparate partitions of our little island in space. A crossing of the cultural streams and folk ties that compress across the globe, towing North and South closer together until they overlap in a marriage of form. Whether it was the winds, or fate, or harmless accident, the odd souls at the project's center have made the most of their encounters, and we, the ever-curious auditors, may now wholly reap the benefit of this serendipity. Viivi María is a Finnish folk musician, well-known in the international accordion competition circuit, and who is currently engaged in dispensing a variation of her Northern traditions to the rest of Europe and beyond as part of the duo Vilda. Cerrero is the nom de plume of Diego Gómez, head of Llorona Records, and highly praised internationally for his dusky and leaky hybrid of Jamaican dub and saturated cumbia. Their collaboration is as unlikely as a shooting start dropping in a catcher's mitt during an amateur baseball game, but just as phenomenal. Viivi's predilection for lanky, swaying melodies suits the rhythmic snap and roll of cumbia quite well, managing to slow the proceedings down with her deliberate techniques without sacrificing their essential weight or physical persuasiveness of the Southern style, all while gifting them a leanness that allows for a narrow threading of seemingly precarious portals- her notes acting as sea birds darting under the peaks of cresting waves as they crash across a rocky shore, grasping nourishment in the moment as if that moment knew no end. Cerrero's moody maelstrom of electronics further freshens Viivi's plucky performance with a cool condensation of subtle rave-beat ramps and a gooey drizzles of chewable dub that lays over the mix like warm arequipe, sweetening and enriching its textures as it smooths out its contours. The album has but three tracks, the first and last are variations on the themes of the other, with the middle track serving as both binder and intermission, spiraling as it weaves diamond-colored laces between the albums halves, orienting them back towards each other, making the entire presentation a kind of mirror reflection of itself, extending in two directions simultaneously as an expressive duel vector of fantastic longitude. Cumbia de Las Almas Extrañas's title implies that this was an unlikely meeting. I content that it was an essential one.
