Ritmos Tropicosmos: 'Purgatorio'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

The origins of the Oakland psychedelic cumbia band Ritmos Tropicosmos date back to 2008-2009 when the group’s bass, synth and organ players, Bobby Cosmos and Jake Rodriguez, began listening to other bands like Frente Cumbiero play experimental cumbia. In 2018, they made a song called “Tumba de la Momia” and released it digitally on SoundCloud the following year.

“Discos Mas [vinyl record label] approached us and asked us if we’d like to release it, so we put it on a 45 [vinyl record], and then we got a band together,” said Cosmos.

He and Rodriguez talked with Ivan Flores from Discos Rezaca Collective about forming an organ cumbia band and later invited some musicians  they’d played with before to join. The band played their first show in 2019 at the Ivy Room in Albany.

Ritmos Tropicosmos’ vocalist and synth player Eli Reyes describes the band as “the weirdos of the cumbia” in how they experiment with the music.

“When it comes to cumbia or Latin American music, even if it’s cover, we always find a way to turn it around, upside down, and represent some of our daily life,” said Reyes. “[There’s] a slight separation from our Latin American roots here in the US where we were raised within two cultures [and we’re] creating our own culture that you can relate to with people of your generation.”

The band’s song “Purgatorio” was written during the pandemic when it was uncertain if life would return to normal.

“If you listen to [Purgatorio], it reflects having one foot in Purgatory and one foot in the real world,” said Cosmos. “So there’s doubles of each instrument in the recording. So there’s two basses, two caja drums, two synthesizers, two congas, there’s two of each thing, two güiras, and so the intention I had behind that is that you’re straddling two different atmospheres.”

The band’s members also include Lesli Rodriguez, Jules Anistasia, Danny Cesena and Michael Veremans.

If you’d like to hear Ritmos Tropicosmos live, the band will perform at Thee Stork Club in Oakland on Oct. 26. Their debut album, La vida es para vivar no trabajar, comes out next spring in 2024.