Mati Zundel to release album

Waxploitation / ZZK Records is pleased to announce experimental dance producer Mati Zundel’s stateside debut, Amazonico Gravitante, out 3/27. A the veteran of Buenos Aires’ famed Club Niceto and one of the leading members of ZZK Records, Mati has emerged as Buenos Aires’ premier producers, pioneering a style that fuses experimental dance with everything from cumbia to bass music.

In honor of the U.S. release of Amazonico Gravitante, NPR Music premiered Mati’s psychedelic video for “Senor Montecostes.” Critic Bob Boilen wrote, “It feels as if Zundel somehow trapped a never-ending block party in his computer. The sounds of steel drums and maracas mix with electronic noise and fuzz to create an energetic, and slightly shambolic dance jam.”

Raised on rural rhythms, Mati’s debut album Amazonico Gravitante blends dance music with música típica, a combination of chacareras, huaynos, and vidalas two-step with electronic textures. Shaman chants and charango guitar loops form the backbone of Mati's songs, and tribal chants create the backbeat to percussion and bass. The result is a furiously original style that takes indigenous roots, and layers it with a contemporary sensibility, maintaining respect for ritual and tradition while pushing classic Latin influences into a cosmic future.

"The Argentine folklore music I heard on the radio all the time as a little boy recorded itself in me from a young age, even though I could only fully appreciate it later,” Mati says. “We have a complicated history in Argentina, always looking to Europe as our example and always negating our own culture, thinking that indigenous culture is ‘uncivilized.’ Now for the first time Argentina is starting to look inside and appreciate its own culture.”

Recorded across Latin America, the songs on Amazonico Gravitante dive deep into Mati’s cumbia obsession — especially “Senor Montecostes,” “Zindud,” (featuring CSS’ Marina Gasolina), and “Cumbia de la Loviya,” — then push beyond the Argentine borders. In “La Montana” he uses Ecuadorean bombo rhythms. In “Por el Pueblo” the lyrics come from traditional Bolivian tarkas, flute music. Taken together, Amazonico Gravitante is an electrifying debut from an artist straight out of the future.


Mati Zundel - Amazonico Gravitante
(3.27 – Waxploitation / ZZK )