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Sample Track 1:
"El Monte" from Bio Ritmo
Sample Track 2:
"Fabula" from Bio Ritmo
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Listening guide with lead singer Rei Alvarez

“With pop music, listeners are spoon-fed bland lyrics and ‘catchy’ melodies that neither challenge the intelligence nor offer anything artistically new”, Bio Ritmo lead singer Rei Alvarez says.  “It’s the same with ‘Hollywood’ movies.  They spell everything out for you, through repeated formulas and over-used one-liners, so you don’t have to think- just consume.  I’d rather assume the audience is intelligent and try to offer something new.  Subtlety is one of the beautiful things that make art art.  If you just hint at something, most will get it, or at least be interested.  You don’t want to lose the aspect of art that should be left to interpretation.  Pop music isn’t about art; it’s about sales.  So they cater to the dumb masses with dumb music.  Whatever I write about, I like to leave room for the listener to apply the lyrics to his/her life.”  This guide will not attempt to tell you how to feel about the songs on the self-titled Bio Ritmo CD, but in Alvarez’s words it will put each song in the proper context and point out a few things for which to listen.


El Monte (The Hill)
The salsa I like, mostly from the ’70’s, was very socially concerned.  Very ‘real life’, and by that I mean that the things these guys sang about were everyday things.  You know, everything: family, loves, life.  Of course you can say that about any music, but the difference is in how they said it- the delivery itself.   A kind of conversational singing that could really hit home through the music.  With El Monte I pay tribute to that kind of feeling with family in mind.  It’s about the one person that you admired most of all, and now that they’re gone the admiration has grown, creating an ideal you could only hope to achieve for yourself.  But that’s how you want to live, especially now.  So, in the song I speak of a hill on which one day I hope to meet him (I never actually mention my grandfather in the verse, but that’s who it is in my life).  I speak of the mirror I see myself in everyday, and of wanting to know that what I imagine can be real one day.

El Cambio (The Change)
It’s very typical in salsa to sing about the rhythm itself.  If it’s a guaracha the sonero is singing, for instance, he might be singing about this guy that came into town and talked all this crap about how he’s got it.  Then the sonero proceeds to prove this guy other wise.  There’s often a ‘dueling’ kind of thing going on with soneros.  Real macho and chivalrous at once.  A sonero establishes the subject matter of the song in the opening verses.  Then, as is in most salsa, a repeating chorus will call out and the sonero responds with an improvised answer.  He always sticks to the subject at hand, and really makes the response swing through rhyme or whatever other technique.  In this song I talk about how I usually come to you in salsa, but this time I showed up with bomba.  Bomba is a rhythm from my hometown of Ponce, Puerto Rico.  Then in the coro I’ll improvise with the freedom of being able to speak of anything to do with bomba.  I can get real abstract with it.

La Hamaca (The Hammock)
I used to spend time in my parent’s backyard swinging on the hammock.  I never thought of it as meditation, but in retrospect I guess that’s what it was.  I cherish time alone, to revel in thoughts of my sadness and in the impossibility of everything.  Salsa is kind of like the blues in subject matter.  Writing this song I thought of how each of those thoughts attack with a million more following, each one a door to endless dreams and regrets.  But then there’s my mom calling me from the kitchen with news of fresh coffee; real life to pull me from the dream world.  Here again, the opportunity to sing about anything these thoughts might bring to the table.

Atrevete (Do It If You Dare)
Marlysse had the main melody ideas for this one.  I liked it so much I wanted the lyrics to capture her sassy spirit.  She’s a little fireball.  The first thing that came to mind was ‘Go ahead, I dare you.  Show up at the party’.  So, the song is about this person who is absolutely not invited, but is obviously having ideas.  I wanted it to be real cute and pretty but sarcastic and funny, like Marlysse, which is why I thought the touch of samba in it was appropriate.  More so, because she shares the love of Brazilian music the rest of us have.

Fabula (Fable)
This song really tells of the sarcastic and dark-humored tendencies of the group.  I was totally absent during the creation of this one, but it’s become one of my favorites in the album.  Marvin Santiago, one of our main inspirations, would present the subjects in his stories as animals in a fable.  It’s about (in a very figurative sense) two ‘elements’ (as soneros sometime refer to certain individuals) that are just going nowhere.  So much so that the song barely makes sense.  One of the elements, if you will, is the ‘matapato’, which literally means ‘duck killer’.  Now, in Puerto Rico this might be misinterpreted as ‘fag killer’, which is not the intent here.  We’re certainly not homophobic.  The other is the 'bacalao', or codfish, a character created by Hector Lavoe (one of the most famous soneros), who is simply someone you see through even though they hide behind their guise.  So, just happens that the words had a ring and stuck. Either way, neither of these ‘elements’ is up to any good, so they are treated accordingly.  Still, we were nice enough to give them a samba break in the middle!

Hermano (Brother)
A brother in life is the most important person aside from family.  For me this song is special because it’s about not only that, but about those you would call brother if the world was different.  For aesthetic reasons, I chose only two songs for which to put the lyrics on the CD insert.  This is one.  It captures the concerns that exist between brothers, one of the biggest being the honor and respect that come from honesty.  I speak of a script that ‘actors’ live by, lies being lived out.  In the call and response part of the song I plead with my ‘brother’ to ‘open his window and live a new day’.  Within these lyrics I pay homage to the Latin-American custom of our refranes, or ‘sayings’: little bits of wisdom to live life by.

El Rayito (The Little Ray [of hope])
Some of us were sick during the time we recorded the album, and at one point I even lost my voice.  I wrote Rayito in my absence from the studio.  It’s basically a conversation between negative emotion and the positive, about depression (my gray cloud), and how it’s come to be something I foolishly defend against the ‘onslaught’ of hope and positivism (the bright ray of hope).  I’ve always found a weird sort of comfort in my sadness; a place to get away.  It almost gives my life purpose, until I realize I’m fooling myself.  Even into the abyss of selfishness can a new morning shine a light into.


Giustino Riccio’s listening guide to Para los Romperos

Romperos is not a word. Romper is to break, so rompero would be someone who breaks things, but it is not a real word. It is very similar in sound to the word rumbero, which is someone who plays the rumba. There is a song by Tito Puente called Para los Rumberos. The name comes from a side project. We had a wedding band and we would be at these weddings and parties, and do our thing. But we made a joke out of always wanting to take breaks from playing. We’d take a break and go to the buffet. Take a break for a couple of drinks outside. So we started calling ourselves the Breaky Boys. I knew I wanted to write an instrumental that we would never be able to play as a wedding band. So I turned it into an incredible ’70’s cop chase scene. Some guy busting out of a door “French Connection” style. And I wanted to give Johnny (bass) a chance to solo with a little 6/8 at the end, and Marlysse takes a crazy solo on the Rhodes. It’s really just a chance to cut loose and giving each of us an opportunity to be featured.



Additional Info
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