VERRACO - "Breathe... Godspeed" LP

Verraco - Breathe... Godspeed 12" EP (Timedance, 2024) Verraco and his peers in Medellín, Colombia once presented themselves as rave revolutionaries: guerillas rising up to topple a hegemonic club culture and wrest electronic music from the Global North’s death grip. They called their label Insurgentes; its inaugural release, Verraco’s debut EP, was titled Resistir. But over the past seven years, Verraco (aka JP López) and his crew have grown from upstarts into some of the most feted names in the underground, kingpins of a scene that onlookers have dubbed—somewhat problematically—“Latin club.” Yet Verraco has never been one to be pigeonholed. True, he deployed cumbia rhythms on the 2020 song “Breaking Hegemonies” and sampled the iconic Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos on “Hasta morir si es preciso.” Releases on his label TraTraTrax, a successor to Insurgentes, are awash in Caribbean dembow, Venezuelan raptor house, Mexican tribal techno, and other sounds from across Latin A