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Empanadas Ilegales
Sancocho Trifásico
We Are Time - 2025
Michael Panontin
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Empanadas Ilegales are back at it with their fourth record and second studio LP to date.
Sancocho Trifásico - sancocho is a hearty stew enjoyed around the Caribbean - follows on the heels of their 2022 disc, Creepy Mambo. Much like its predecessor, it is chock full of that slithery psychedelic cumbia that came out of Peru in the '60s and '70s. And like the dish, it is a complex, multi-layered mix of influences and pleasures. The band riffed on this in an interview in Tigre Sounds, with drummer Daniel Ruiz describing the album as "a wild, rich mix of flavors, cultures, and energies, simmered over time". Bassist Daniel Hernandez Pinto called it "more abstract - like a tryptic. It's a blend of phases, sounds, and emotions".
The opener, the heavily percussive 'Suto Ta Kandá (de las 4 a las 12)', states their case as well as anything on the album. The terse track clocks in at less than two minutes, but it's a frenetic and fascinating burst of afro-percussive rhythms that features guest percussionist Jerlin Torres Salgado, who hails from the town of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. "Palenque is the first town in the Americas founded by Africans who freed themselves from slavery, and it has preserved its own language and culture," the group explained. "We brought the Palenquero language into our music - something you rarely hear in psych or tropical fusion."
Exhibit B would have to be the groovy 'Gher Bede (Sanguijuela)', a song that melds Persian ('gher bede' means 'shake it' in Farsi) and Peruvian influences into an intoxicating cross-cultural mix. "We layered in Persian grooves and Egyptian melodies, filtered through our psychedelic tropical lens...Being surrounded by a strong Iranian and Middle Eastern community in BC made this track feel even more meaningful. It's about connection through rhythm - familiar and new."
Of course, there's plenty of straight-up chicha to please the purists. The aptly-named 'Chichara' and the more psychedelic 'La Trifulca', for instance, are both perfect blends of meandering, hip-swaying groove and captivating guitar. This is exactly the stuff that makes cumbia so much richer and complex - to these ears anyway - than more popular dance genres like salsa, merengue and bachata. Chicha, when it's done well, is a hypnotic, almost transcendent experience. You lose yourself - both physically and mentally - to those hypnotic sounds. And on Sancocho Trifásico, Empanadas Ilegales do it very well.
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