Karen y los Remedios' 'Bestiaria' Slows Cumbia Down Until It Starts Telling Secrets
Three years after Silencio, Karen y los Remedios return with a bestiary: curanderas, Mayahuel, Ixchel, Las Moiras, La Bruja. Twelve tracks, forty-four minutes, and a working method built on cumbia rebajada — the Monterrey tradition of slowing cumbia records down on purpose until the groove sags and sweats.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: rebajada lives or dies on this, and Jiony — Jonathan Muriel, the trio’s producer — gets it right by letting the bass go slightly rubbery, pitched down just far enough that it reads as unease rather than error. The Spatial Dynamics: Z.A.M.P.A. (Guillermo Berbeyer) fills the mid-range with guitars that behave more like trip-hop pads than cumbia riffs, which leaves an enormous amount of room at the top. Matias Parisi’s mastering keeps the whole thing quiet enough that you lean in — a counterintuitive choice for dance music, and the correct one here. “Espejismos” clears the room almost entirely; “Satanás,” a 1981 Publio Martínez composition the band resurrects, is the only moment that genuinely stomps.
Standout Performance
Ana Karen G. Barajas. Her delivery is featherweight and almost conversational, floated over arrangements that keep threatening to drag her under, and she never once oversings to compete with them. Bandcamp Daily credited the record with building “a thrilling world” around her voice, and that’s the right preposition — the band builds around her.
Why It’s Certified
ZZK has spent years on exactly this seam between Latin tradition and electronic production, and Bestiaria is one of the label’s most disciplined entries. Bandcamp Daily’s Filipe Costa named it Album of the Day, describing “a more esoteric strain of cumbiatón” whose songs each arrive “as a small, unexpected pop pleasure.” Four days old at the time of writing and barely reviewed anywhere — which is usually how the good ones start.