Transplanted in New York City, two natives of Bogotá, Columbia, guitarist Camilo Rodriguez and drummer Andrés Jimenez, met at a workshop on traditional music from the northern coast of Colombia. They played together for nearly four years before they arrived at a concept for M.A.K.U. Soundsystem. This would be a band that would fuse traditional Colombian rhythms and 1970s West African afrobeat with reggae, hip-hop, funk, and jazz. They adapted the band name as a tribute to the Nukak Maku, an indigenous tribe in their native country that lived with no outside contact until the late 1980s. Formed in 2010 in Queens, New York, M.A.K.U. Soundsystem presently consists of Rodriguez, Jimenez, vocalist/bassist Juan "Prodigio Arribetiao" Ospina, also of Bogotá, and two natives of Barranquilla, Colombia, vocalist/percussionist Liliana "Lana Baja" Conde and percussionist Moris Cañate. M.A.K.U. Soundsystem's third and most recent studio album, Mezcla, was released on May 27, 2016.
M.A.K.U. Soundsystem performed a midnight set at Dröm tonight, melding tribal vocals, psychedelic guitar, hoodoo rhythms, and a dance-party spirit into a genre-defying trance-like jam. Many of the lyrics were in Spanish, but many times the choruses seemed to be repetitious interjections designed to boost the band's prominent percussion-led grooves. Particularly now that the band no longer has a horn section or a synthesizer player, the scaled-back band relied more on sway than punch, and the now simpler arrangements were smooth, bouncy and hypnotic. Ultimately, this was a borderless world music for freeing the mind and shaking the body.
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