Mexican Institute of Sound and Meridian Brothers Rebuild 1970s Cumbia With Vintage Synths on ‘Ruido Tovar’

Camilo Lara spent years trying to convince Eblis Álvarez to make a record together. The Colombian musician, who leads the neo-tropical ensemble Meridian Brothers, repeatedly deflected the invitation until a personal relocation to Mexico finally opened the door. The result is “Ruido Tovar,” a collaborative album released in May that strips late-1970s and early-1980s Latin American cumbia down to its analog components and rebuilds it as a psychedelic rhythm experiment.

Lara, who records under the name Mexican Institute of Sound, described the creative partnership as a high-speed collision. Álvarez eventually proposed centering the project around the specific synthesizer textures that defined tropical music during that transitional era, when traditional acoustic percussion first collided with electronic keyboards across Colombia and Mexico.

Rather than relying on digital software or modern sampling techniques, the two artists constructed the album entirely from physical hardware. Inside Lara’s Mexico City studio, they assembled a wall of vintage synthesizers — including Sequential Circuits Prophets, Moogs, Roland Junos, and Jupiter models — mirroring the exact instruments available to working cumbia musicians four decades ago. They recorded the album in person over the course of a year, an increasingly rare production method in an industry now dominated by remote file-sharing.

The recording process was strictly compartmentalized by genre. Sessions were scheduled to tackle one specific rhythmic style per day, cycling through boogaloo, digital danzón, and traditional cumbia structures. Álvarez handled the virtuosic keyboard performances, while Lara, who does not read sheet music, focused on arrangement concepts and sonic architecture.

“Ruido Tovar” takes its name from Rigo Tovar, the Mexican singer who pioneered the fusion of cumbia with rock and electronic music in the 1970s. Tovar’s legacy serves as the philosophical anchor for the record. His original experiments proved that tropical genres could absorb foreign technology without losing their regional identity, a thesis both Lara and Álvarez extend into more dissonant, occasionally loopy territory.

American alternative musician Beck appears on two tracks, most notably the anthemic “Cumbia Beckiana.” His involvement traces back roughly five years to an unannounced visit to Lara’s studio in Mexico City. Beck began frequenting the space, and the two started developing material using Meridian Brothers as a stylistic reference point. When Lara mentioned the full-length collaboration with Álvarez, Beck requested to participate. Recording sessions later moved to Beck’s Los Angeles studio, where his vocal delivery on “Ritmo Babilonia” immediately stamped the track with his distinct phrasing.

Beneath the album’s bright, playful synthesizer tones runs a persistent current of melancholy. Lara attributes this duality directly to Mexican cultural sensibilities, pointing to the national affinity for melodrama visible in everything from telenovelas to the enduring domestic popularity of Morrissey. He compares the emotional landscape to chamoy, the traditional Mexican condiment that balances sweet, sour, salty, and spicy flavors simultaneously. For Lara, daily life in Mexico inherently pairs joy with systemic violence and corruption, a tension that bleeds into his songwriting regardless of the tempo.

This thematic approach has evolved significantly since Lara launched Mexican Institute of Sound two decades ago. His 2004 debut album, “Méjico Máxico,” originally attempted to emulate the electronic precision of Kraftwerk and Can, filtered through the sample-heavy hip-hop aesthetics of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. Because his foundational samples were drawn from Mexican tropical records, the output inevitably sounded like música tropical. Over twenty years, Lara stopped resisting that gravitational pull, recognizing that his childhood exposure to regional music was inseparable from his artistic identity.

Unlike many producers in the global electronic scene who mine mid-century sounds purely for nostalgic value, Lara rejects retro fetishism. He views Mexican musical traditions as living frameworks designed to be fused and altered, expressing far more interest in future experimentation than in preserving the 1950s or 1960s.

Lara, 50, recently expanded his geographic footprint by moving part-time to Los Angeles, settling in the Outpost Estates neighborhood near Hollywood. The relocation marks a shift for an artist deeply rooted in Mexico City’s urban density, trading it for immediate access to surrounding nature.

Mexican Institute of Sound and Meridian Brothers will perform “Ruido Tovar” live on Wednesday at the Regent in Los Angeles. The concert format features individual sets from both bands before merging onstage to play the collaborative material together.