Chicha Libre

Amateur ethnomusicology keeps getting funkier and weirder. The Brooklyn-based Chicha Libre may lack the sex appeal of fellow New York club favorite Brazilian Girls and the instrumental wizardry of guitarist Marc Ribot’s much-missed electric son party-band, Los Cubanos Postizos, but the sextet needs neither to win over a crowd. That’s because it’s the first (and only) American outfit to advance the cause of chicha, a previously little-known style of Peruvian dance music that gently works tried-and-true cumbia rhythms with electric guitar and keyboards over more traditional instrumentation like tumbadoras, the cuatro (a small, four-string guitar) and bass.

Olivier Conan, who co-owns the Park Slope venue and record label Barbes, discovered the sound by accident while tramping through Peru, snapping up bootleg CDs. Named after a corn-based liquor with which the Incas welcomed the Spanish conquistadors, the music pretty much peaked in the 1980s and was later generally disparaged.

Conan’s 2007 compilation The Roots of Chicha sold nearly 10,000 copies, and Chicha Libre’s own Sonido Amazonico! isn’t doing half-bad, either. Much like the band’s whimsical and psychotropic live shows, the disc mixes up a woozy, loping pulse with a surfy twang that serves vintage chicha fare and homebrewed originals with lo-fi enthusiasm.

It’s only a pity that the musicians don’t distill their own version of the Incan intoxicant. Conan unashamedly admits, “I never touched the stuff.”