¡ON WITH THE SONIDERO!
Las Fiestas Mas Locas en Mexico City
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Sonideros are commonly described as the club DJs of Mexico. Towards the end of the 1950s, they began to liven up neighbourhood dances, block parties, and popular salons in Mexico City. Substituting the traditional trios, groups, and big bands, they performed at quinceañera birthdays, baptisms, founder’s days, weddings, and anniversaries of all kinds. At the beginning they used sound equipment modified to make the music more powerful—and to not explode when the current skipped, which happened often then. They amplified and accentuated the music with live trumpets. Soon a lighting scheme was incorporated: They built devices of multicoloured lights out of reflectors from Volkswagens and airplanes and made them spin with windshield wiper motors. They played music that wasn’t popular, but was soon validated and consolidated in Mexico thanks to them: mainly cumbias, guarachacas, and sones montunos. These genres made the trip from Columbia in a slow trickle of imported records.
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