Like many great genres, cumbia rebajada was born from the collision of accident and destiny. Its origin story has been told so often that it has taken on the quality of myth. At some point in the early 1990s, in Monterrey, Mexico, a DJ named Gabriel Dueñez was playing a wedding party when his turntables began to malfunction. He’d been spinning for hours, and beneath the heat of the record players’ overworked motors, and the heat from all those dancing bodies, a crucial piece of machinery began to melt, causing the platters to rotate at half speed. The result was a kind of psychedelic sludge, narcotic in its languor: voices slurred, brass turned liquid, accordions rendered spongy and bog-like.
Dueñez’ music of choice, cumbia, was already pregnant with meaning: Born in Colombia, it had been adopted by generations of Mexican migrants to the northern industrial city, who identified with cumbia’s rural imagery and inherent longing. Cumbia was the community’s musical lingua franca—a source, for these marginalized working poor, of both nostalgia and a sense of belonging. (So fierce was the local fandom that the neighborhood of La Independencia became known as “Little Colombia.”) Slowing down the music supercharged it, made it transcendent and otherworldly. It wasn’t just the sonic effect, although fans of similarly altered styles—Houston screw, Belgian popcorn, etc.—have long been aware of the mind-bending wooziness of mechanically pitched-down recordings. In the case of cumbia, stepping on the brakes opened up space for reflection, played tricks with time, maybe even jammed a wrench in the gears of history.
What happens when you slow down music that’s already been slowed down? That’s the question Mexican American experimental musician Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, asks on her recent album Deceleradas, an homage to—and reinterpretation of—the subgenre that came to be known as cumbia rebajada. Her source material is a pair of cassette tapes recorded by Dueñez in the ’90s, two of a series of bootlegs that the sonidero and his wife sold at the flea market along the Puente del Papa, a bridge connecting Monterrey’s prosperous city center with its mountainside slums. (Working with Monterrey’s Sabotaje Media, Beatriz recently assisted in reissuing both tapes for Boomkat.) Her tool of choice is granular synthesis, which, as its name suggests, allows for the manipulation of sound at the quasi-atomic level. Running Dueñez’s recordings through granular processing, and fleshing them out with her own accordion playing, she has made an already phantasmagoric music exponentially more hallucinatory.
Rather than simply stretching out Dueñez’s pitched-down reworks, she explodes them from inside. “Desplazos” opens the album with what might be trembling guitars and a swirl of feedback—a desolate sound, formless and unsettled, reminiscent of Flying Saucer Attack at his most haunted. “vinilos trasnacionales” smears wheezing accordion into a forlorn, Philip Jeck-like dirge; “La Ronda y el sonidero” is an inchoate spray of dissonant tones and chopped-up cries, as disorienting as a Nurse With Wound record. Encountering Desaceleradas without context, you might never guess at its provenance; whether by intention or as a byproduct of its analogically stressed and digitally mangled origins, its reference points are more in keeping with dark ambient and industrial music.
This isn’t the first time that Beatriz has drawn ghostly spirits out of Mexican history. For 2022’s The Long Count, she used computer modeling and machine learning to recreate the sounds of Mayan instruments that have lain silent for more than a thousand years, to surrealistic and occasionally harrowing effect. That album steered far clear folkloric kitsch, preferring dissonant frequencies and minimalist arrangements. Desaceleradas similarly has little patience for cliché—fortunately, it’s also a warmer and more welcoming listen than The Long Count, at least to drone aficionados. And while you won’t find many memorable hooks in her miasmic soundscapes, neither do they blur together. Eleven songs and 40 minutes long, it’s a nicely varied album. Despite the preponderant gloom, the vinyl crackle and resonant guitars of “Sonido Dueñez” fizz like a GAS record and the buzzing tone clusters of “Cholombia, MTY” have a soothing, lullaby-like effect.
I do occasionally wonder if something has been lost in the analog-to-digital translation. The music’s drawn-out blur reminds me, faintly, of the Paulstretching craze of 2010, wherein Justin Bieber’s perky “U Smile” was slowed into an epic, ambient-adjacent sprawl that drew comparisons to Sigur Rós and Stars of the Lid; soon, meme-makers around the world were applying the technique to everything from Radiohead to Rebecca Black. If Debit applied her granular magic to a radically different source, would it sound significantly different?
Still, there’s an appealing fractal logic in her mission to unlock a hidden dimension within cumbia rebajada’s already distended durations. The style has always been a music both deeply rooted and weirdly untethered—a music of physical migration and cultural mutation, of place and placelessness, of the materiality of the medium (the blunted stylus dragging through a crackling, worn-down groove) and the ethereality of the sound bleeding from the sonideros’ systems into the surrounding neighborhood. Its beauty is that it refuses to be pinned down. And on Desaceleradas, Beatriz chooses not to explain away cumbia rebajada’s contradictions, but to celebrate its fundamental mystery.
