The immigrant experience is scary and it’s exciting. Everything is new, everything is possible. There’s a city, a country, an entire culture to discover. It’s an opportunity to create, to find a voice that speaks loud and proud, to connect past and future. A chance to make history. That’s what the eight-piece M.A.K.U. Soundsystem does on their fourth album, Mezcla (‘Mix’). They give us America now, in the raw, through the eyes and ears of Colombians who’ve arrived and made their homes in New York City. It is, in every way, a mix, an invitation to think and to dance.

Mezcla is a relentlessly honest record. The music hits the feet and the hips, powerful and overwhelming, while the lyrics reflect the lives the band members live. There’s the giddy flirtation of a summer Saturday night on ‘Haitiana’ and the thought that comes from looking around somewhere so different and asking ‘What Do You Wish For.’ But it also embraces darker political questions that don’t have easy answers. The opening track, ‘Agua,’ for instance, wonders why some people own the seeds that should be for everyone – who are those who have and who are the dispossessed? And ‘De Barrio,’ the warm, inviting waltz that closes the disc, examines the journey so many coming from Latin America to the US undertake.

“They’re putting their lives at risk to come to El Norte,” explains bassist and singer Juan Ospina. “But the borders they cross have all been created by man. Look down from space and you won’t see them.”

Every moment of Mezcla mixes the musicians’ past and their present. ‘Let It Go’ builds from a percussive root born in Colombia by way of Cape Verde, hits a groove straight out of West Africa, then adds bright retro Moog that comes from a ‘90s club, and tops it with horns that edge into jazz........
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