Description
“Sounds like a lost night in the Amazon with a Moog, drum machine and leather jacket. Psychedelic, playful and authentic.” — Will “Quantic” Holland
What if Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee, Elliot Smith, Ralf Hütter, Eliades Ochoa, Nino Rota, Cluster and Ennio Morriconi went on a vision quest to Peru and brought a 4-track with them? What if they hung out and jammed with Los Wemblers de Iquitos at an itinerant circus in the jungle, bumped into Alejandro Jodorowski in the midst of filming a lost epic in the Temple of The Sun at Machu Picchu, and were abducted (along with their tapes) by a sexy alien piloting a glowing UFO? Curious? Then come with C.A.M.P.O.S. on an audio journey to find out what that could sound like…
C.A.M.P.O.S. is the new project from multi-talented multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer Joshua Camp, aka Juan Campos (Chicha Libre, One Ring Zero, Litvakus as well as sideman for Los Crema Paraiso and others). What does the enigmatic name C.A.M.P.O.S. stand for? Officially it’s Cumbias And More Psychedelic Original Sounds, but you have to sit down and listen to these two records in their entirety to grasp its meaning fully. It’s all here: from lo-fi experiments to lush soundscapes, field recordings to dance-floor ditties, stories of love and war, slavery, revelation, redemption, temptation, ruin, rebirth, and through it all, the healing power of music seen through the steamy lens of magic-realism.
A mutual friend, pianist Marlysse Simmons (Bio Ritmo, Miramar), encouraged Peace & Rhythm to inquire with Mr. Camp about a cache of unreleased recordings in his archives. She had heard some of the songs and thought we’d be interested. Amazingly, these tracks were tunes that had been shelved or left on the cutting room floor from past years. Recordings that either never got finished, came from other incomplete projects, were rejected demos for previous albums, or were slated for an upcoming but never recorded release.
Once Joshua realized how excited Peace & Rhythm was by this pool of unreleased music and understood our desire to put them out, he tweaked and tinkered with some, fleshed out others that were mostly bare bones, revamped still others that he had always wanted to get to but had not really had the validation, right context, or time to complete. Here was the perspective of someone else, from outside the history of this music, urging him on, valuing this refugee group of orphaned, discarded and under-fed recordings, seeing them for what they could be: an imaginary travelogue, an accidental concept album of psychedelic tropical Americana. Like the soundtrack of a movie Joshua Camp has always wanted to make but then it turns out it’s all in his head. What a place to be… And now you too can join him in his magical tropidelic world of miracles and criminals.
