Balance (reissue) vinyl

El Buho's (Robin Perkins') influential 2017 debut album returns with its first repress, aiding our reflections on an album that helped define the digital folklorica and "natural cumbia" movements emergent in electronic music in the latter half of the 2010s. Balance weaves a complex darn of naturalism, Latin American rhythms, and modern synthetic percussion design, smudging the lines cordoning off organics and synthesis. Hailed in the press as "the ultimate fusion of nature and music" and for evidencing Mexico's indigenous roots in sound, El Buho helped bridge organic and digital worlds of cumbia Andina and chicha with electronic textures here, presaging and perhaps causing the clamour over cumbia that has since ensued.