Although he named his band after the stuff, Chicha Libre’s Olivier Conan confesses he’s never swallowed a mouthful of chicha, a corn liquor common in the backwaters of Peru. “You have to spit it out to make it ferment,” he explains over the phone from his home base, New York City, where his nightclub Barbès is located. “I was not quite ready. There’s a soda version called chicha Morada, a purple soda, which I’ve had. It’s actually pretty good. You can probably find it in Montreal.”

You can also find Conan’s band in Montreal this week, sharing the music called chicha, an early-’70s melange of psych-pop and surf rock underscored by Colombian cumbias, Andean folk music and Brazilian grooves. The latter are reflective of the Amazonian region from whence chicha music hails, where Peru rubs up against its neighbours.

Conan discovered it while on vacation, seeking out Afro-Peruvian Creole tunes. Eager bootleg vendors clued him in, and he quickly fell for it—hard enough to seek out surviving recordings and artists, to assemble his compilation The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias, and then form the band with entirely non-Peruvian folks like One Ring Zero’s Joshua Camp (who plays a groovy, retro Electravox, a hybrid of organ and accordion) and Combustible Edison bassist Nicholas Cudahy. Conan himself sings and plays the cuatro, a sort of midget guitar.

Truth is, chicha isn’t exactly a lost sound. “Chicha itself is more popular than ever, it’s just that the kind of authentic, funky, new sound that came at the time has changed. It’s become more commercial, as most music does, and it’s using a lot of cheesy sounds. It’s become more of a formula now, so it has less of a sense of excitement. That’s true of all genres, though, especially music from the Third World.

“The most amazing thing is there’s a revival in Peru that’s happening now as a result of the compilation coming out, which is not something I was expecting at all. I’m getting all these big shows on mainstream television in Peru that want to do a story on Chicha Libre, because all of a sudden they see it as culturally valuable—which is kind of a nice twist. The same thing happened with so many other genres, from Cajun to forró to soukous. It’s a pretty familiar pattern.”

What’s nice about Chicha Libre is that they aren’t excessively reverential about the music. They have fun with it, covering the seminal Moog-pop hit “Popcorn,” Satie and Ravel, and tossing in their own original compositions, on their debut disc, ¡Sonido Amazonico!.

“That’s the great thing about chicha—it’s played by people who don’t own the genre. They’re making it up by piecing together everything they’ve ever heard, whether it’s cumbia, Brazilian music, huayanos from the highlands, rock, etc, etc. Instead of taking the music we like, we took the process, which makes for more interesting music. Otherwise we’d just be doing museum pieces, which would be silly.

“In order to generate something that sounds like what they do, we had to make it our own, and use our own environment, which is classical music and ’70s stuff, because it’s relevant. That’s why we cover a famous French pop song and ‘Popcorn,’ and twist them to meet the chicha standards. To me, ‘Popcorn’ has the added value of being the first 45 single I ever bought.”

-by Rupert Bottenberg