Now, if you had been frequenting this site over the past year, the Corpus Christi, TX-based producer, DJ and electronic music artist, Horacio Olivera, best known as El Dusty has become a JOVM mainstay artist of sorts, while deepening his reputation for being a pioneer of a revolutionary new subgenre he’s dubbed “nu-cumbia,” which possesses elements of contemporary electronic music production with enormous, tweeter and woofer rocking beats, bits of live instrumentation and chopped up samples of classic and beloved cumbia track to create a trippy, club-rocking and hyper-modern take on Latin music that subtly draws from hip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass and house music among others. If you’ve been frequenting this site over the past year or so, you may recall that earlier this year I wrote about “Cumbia Anthem,” a club-banging collaboration with Dominican twerk production Happy Colors that featured woofer and tweeter rattling 808s, tons of trap-inspired snare drum, and a glitchy and incredibly chopped up sample from Colombian cumbia star Andrés Landero’s “Bailando Cumbia.” Although incredibly modern, it the track retains the sound and feel of a classic cumbia song – while being incredibly anthemic. “Orale,” the second single I wrote about was a slickly produced trap song with woofer and tweeter rattling bass, hard-hitting drums, stuttering drum programming, staccato synth stabs, airhorns and twinkling electronics that’s not just a marvel of modern production, it’s a song that possess an enormous, crowd rocking sound that’s both club and festival-friendly. Olivera’s third single “We Out Chea” continued his collaboration with Happy Colors — and much like “Cumbia Anthem,” the track pairs tweeter and woofer rocking 808s with a chopped up cumbia sample with MLKMN‘s swaggering, Dirty South meets trap music flow in a song that possessed elements of contemporary hip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass, trap house, cumbia and techno in a mischievous and adventurous fashion. And “Cinco De Mayo,” which was fittingly released on — well, Cinco De Mayo was a collaboration with Los Dutis and Morenito De Fuego furthered Olivera’s burgeoning reputation for swaggering and anthemic productions featuring stuttering and chopped up samples but also including layers of synths, bloops, bleeps and beeps in a way that nodded to electronic music artist and producers like Boys Noize and others.
Olivera’s latest single “La Chusa” is a collaboration featuring Camilo Lara and Toy Selectah, which as Olivera explained to Univision in a recent interview, derives its title “from a South Texas Chicano folk story about this owl [in some Spanish speaking countries lechuza means owl] with the with the face of an old lady that stands on top of your house and scares kids into acting good. When I was a kid I was petrified of it!” Sonically though the song is comprised of a classic and beloved Columbian cumbia track, Los Hermanos Tuirán’s “La cumbia de la cordillera,” a track that’s not only about a bird on a mountain, and not even remotely related to El Dusty’s title, but it has also been used by sound systems and global bass DJs in Columbia and elsewhere. Interestingly, the track is a buoyant and swaggering track, full of tweeter and woofer rocking beats and bass paired with a joyous and mischievously anthemic hook that will make you get off your ass and move.
The recently released music video continues to cement Olivera’s burgeoning reputation for pairing his music with vivid and wild animation that takes after horror movies, cartoons and shows vatos hanging out and driving around town while blasting music before hitting up the club, dancing and trying to pick up some beautiful ladies — before discovering that the object of one’s desire is actually an anthropomorphic version of la chusa.