The Colombian band Systema Solar pulled off a neat trick to call itself into existence, orchestrating its inception in front of a sizable crowd: when Vanessa Gocksch, a DJ in the not-yet-formed group, was invited to play at an Art Biennial in Medellín, she came back to the booker with a bold counter offer. “I told the promoter, ‘hey we’ve been thinking of creating a band, what if we create the band [for the festival]?'” she recalls. “He was like, ‘sure. I won’t tell anybody that you guys don’t exist yet.'”
After a short period of frantic preparation, the seven-person group made its debut in front of several thousand listeners. “We had a month to pull everybody together,” Gocksch says. “Everybody threw in their songs that they had on the back burner.” “We never got to rehearse really until we got on the stage,” adds Juan Carlos Pellegrino. “That’s how we started.”
That dauntless, madcap spirit still pervades the band’s work ten years later. Systema Solar just released a new record, Rumbo a Tierra, and it shows a group on the verge of reaching a wider audience. The single “Rumbera” was picked as the theme song for the video game FIFA 2017; the Discovery Channel recently adopted Rumbo a Tierra‘s first track, “Tumbamurallas,” as the theme for its Latin American programming; and T-Mobile has been using “Sin Oficio.”
Rumbo a Tierra also provides the band with their first stint of sustained exposure in the U.S.: it’s the second Systema Solar album to appear in this country in under 12 months. Last March’s eponymous release — on the independent, Los Angeles-based label Nacional — cherry-picked songs from the group’s previous records, showcasing their omnivorous tastes stateside for the first time.
Open ears and sonic curiosity played an important part in uniting Systema Solar a decade ago. Gocksch and Pellegrino were working together on the soundtrack for a documentary on Colombian hip-hop when they discovered a shared enthusiasm for Champeta, a strain of music from coastal Colombia that is itself a cross-cultural hybrid. “They started to get records from Africa in the ’70s and make covers of these records, then they started a sound system culture like the one that there is in Jamaica,” Pellegrino explains. “They would play on top of the African music and translate it into Spanish, and that’s called Champeta.” “It seemed like an amazing version of electronic music,” Gocksch continues.
Pellegrino, meanwhile, was already collaborating with Daniel Broderick, another future Systema member, attempting electronic transpositions of cumbia — “trying to get the Colombian, Caribbean elements into electronic music as a real fusion,” he says, as opposed to just jury-rigging the combination via samples.