LATINO RESISTE

Colombia in 2001 was still getting used to have massive access to internet at home, and the proliferation of music sharing thanks to Napster, Torrents, E-mule, or myspace made it much easier for most of the people to finally get their hands on artists, music and genres they couldn’t have reached otherwise.

Most of us would rely on cafe internet whose speed was better than home, and burning cds was the norm.

Trying to present a new idea to the masses was really difficult to emerging artists, mainly because Bogota’s district cultural curators or co-creators were the same managers of the acts they booked to festivals.

So, it was a network -by invite only- dynamic that made almost impossible for people who thought outside the norm, or came from disadvantaged neighborhoods to actually reach a wider audience.

Born from the union of two acts raised in some of the most turbulent neighborhoods in Bogota, Kennedy and Suba, H.U.M.O, Therapy for Pain and Caballo were bringing something quite different to the Colombian scene at the moment.

H.U.M.O. fusioned nu-metal, folklore, ragga, and rock much before than anyone else, Caballo was breaking archaic values on Cumbia, by adding dancehall beats, Drum & Bass or mixing acid jazz with raggametal. Therapy for Pain was/is a Colombian metal project that doesn’t respect any genre.

The releases of the first EP of each project were received with mixed reviews. Most of the curators and music events-festival-district keyholders were not very receptive mostly due to the economic background from where the projects came from and also the fact they were not even close to the norm of the times.

Born of anger, knowing we had a great product and no one to share it with. The rebel records and QuintoPiso were created to release and share these projects on the internet the same way we were collecting music.

The Rebel records dropped their first single in 2001 for free on the internet, Therapy for Pain Industrial’s rage featuring Ronny Bardon -guitarrist of Neurosic INC-and QuintoPiso followed it later with H.U.M.O.

While the scene on the bars and the festivals were deaf to us, the internet, especially Napster and mediafire made a difference. in fact, some of the most reluctant to collaborate and somehow massive underground artists, like Rene from iconic Colombian punk band ODIO A BOTERO, Cesar Botero vocalist of Agony, were quite surprised with what we were pre-producing next that they jumped on to the next releases and right there, having these super talented artists, a new approach to release music was forming as well.

Blogs, Mediafire, Mega, torrents, MySpace, FMA, the creation of creative commons and many more ways were popping up at an amazing speed.

At the same time, a sense of Latinhood was growing up, the more we downloaded, the more we shared, the more we saw Latinos were connected to the same vibe.

Latino Resiste was the fusion of Quintopiso & The rebel records to release our most political or thinking-forward music while trying to keep it as real as possible.

So, very soon this fusion had some of the most wicked acts from Bogota.

H.U.M.O whose fusion were unmatched at the time.

Reggaeman who was RENE’s alterego and had less punk energy and more ragga related music.

Therapy for Pain making all sorts of aggressive music.

Pielmantra, whose approach to folklore rock was unparallel at the time. True pioneers.

A-lion, and his project Populion who is still one of the best Dancehall-urban singers from Colombian underground scene.

And Caballo and his project The Mothafu Kings, who need no introduction nor explanation if you know about Latino resiste.

A total of 14 tracks made between 2001 to 2005 as a showcase of what we were doing at the time.

The people who first and foremost, we thank, and believed in the label, and to all of those who have been with us for the past or at any moment in these 25 years.

We will be re-releasing some of the most iconic stuff from the label.

Without further ado,

LATINO RESISTE- 25 YEARS *2001-2005 ERA*