CONECTADOS – Connected in Innovative Electronic Music

Every Friday night during 3 seasons per year, you can find a peaceful musical space in a charming colonial building in Bogota’s oldest and most gorgeous neighbourhood La Candelaria. There you’ll find people wanting to listen to, and appreciate music. And all of you will probably experience cool, innovative electronic music by (mostly) Colombian and (some) international artists. That space is called CONECTADOS (CONNECTED).

Mercury

Mercury

Diana Yanive Torres, Director of Fundacion Cultural Arca in Bogota, explains here what the Fundacion’s CONECTADOS project is all about:

CONECTADOS (‘CONNECTED’) is an electronic music program that facilitates through live concerts, artistic exchanges and creative workshops, an opening for Colombian artists to develop and share their distinct and diverse electronic music projects drawn from synthesizers, sequencers, computers and other digital tools.

The program was created by Daniel Casas C (Colombian journalist and music critic) and Fundacion Cultural Arca (Cultural Ark Foundation) in August 2010, in association with Bogota’s Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (‘FUGA’).

The CONECTADOS concert series are open to the public and free.  They are presented 3 seasons per year at the Escenario Muelle de la Alzate (FUGA) (Calle 10 # 3-16).  During the season the concerts run every Friday from 6.00 to 7.00 pm.

CONECTADOS orientates the public to the electronic music genre and its various sub-genres.  The program provides an exchange space for the many diverse participating Colombian and international electronic music artists

So far CONECTADOS has run 9 seasons running for 2 months each, showcasing a total of more than 70 artists. 

Between 2012 and 2013 CONECTADOS formalised an exchange between Canadian and Colombian artists through Quebec’s International Youth Offices (www.lojiq.org).  This  initiative allowed Fundacion Cultural Arca to establish cooperative procedures with other foreign cultural organisations – helping CONECTADOS to continue growing as a cooperative cultural exchange project for empirical artists and electronic music professionals – and continue facilitating the creation and expansion of their activities.

CIRCUITO CONECTADOS - Flyer

CONECTADOS - logoFor more CONECTADOS information:

http://conectadosmusicaelectronica.blogspot.com/

direccion@fundacionculturalarca.org / casascd@gmail.com

 For a few words from Diana about electronic fusion music check out the Fusion Music page.

Electronic Fusion Music in Bogota is….

Diana Torres, Director of Fundación Cultural Arca, based in Bogota, says this about electronic fusion music in Bogota:

What we have found about fusion in electronic music in Bogota since we started ´Conectados´ (Connected) – a program of live electronic music concerts – is that it take us to the cultural heritage of local sounds of our culture and other cultures of the world, in a space and time where the artist and the audience connect with a universal language: THE SOUND.

Diana Torres - Director, Fundacion Cultural Arca

Richard Blair – Musical Experience of the Week

My musical experiences in Bogota this week were of different types and qualities.

The best one?  Well it wasn’t really fusion music. It wasn’t even a live band.

It was a DJ set by Richard Blair: Producer and Engineer;  Founder of Sidestepper, a very successful Colombian fusion music band; and an artist well recognised and respected both in and outside of Colombia as one of the first pioneers of Colombian fusion music.

Richard Blair - Sidestepper

Richard Blair – Sidestepper

Sidestepper @ WOMADelaide

Sidestepper @ WOMADelaide

Sidestepper I have more to say about later.  There is also much I could tell you about the incredible artists Blair has worked with in his career (including my all time favorite Colombian artist, the divine Toto La Momposina).

Blair´s DJ Set this week was part of a high quality electronic music program called ´Conectados´.

Richard Blair

Richard Blair

Conectados is just one of many musical and other arts projects run by Fundacion Cultural Arca – a non-profit organisation in Bogota, set up to support artists in a variety of ways, and to develop international cultural exchanges. The Foundation runs Conectados in association with Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, a part of the Colombian Ministry of Culture and Tourism, also dedicated to supporting and promoting indepèndent music and other arts projects in Colombia.

So why was a DJ set the best musical experience of the week?

Richard Blair - DJ Set - Conectados - 2013 - www.beaveronthebeats.com

  • It wasn’t reggeaton, with only touches of pure reggae, being played in a bar which is supposedly a ‘reggae’ bar. More about the sickly reggeaton plague another day.
  • It wasn’t musicians playing on a very dirty, busy, public road called La Septima.
  • It wasn’t bad quality live music like I heard played by one Latin fusion band on Friday night.
  • The crowd wasn’t rude, noisy or disrespectful  like I experienced at Rock al Parque or at countless other gigs in my life.

What is was, is this:

  • high quality musicsuper tasty vintage, vinyl dub and reggae.

Richard Blair DJ Set in Bogota - Beaver on the Beats

  • high quality mixing, sampling and turntabling by Blair.
  • high quality sound in the venue.
  • a beautiful, ambient outdoor patio space in a colonial building filled with a respectful, appreciative audience.

All those things made for a lovely musical and human experience.

The only surreal thing about the Richard Blair gig was sitting down on chairs with the rest of the ‘audience’, to watch a DJ play music. No matter for me though. It was still awesome to listen to, and there is plenty of time for dancing to tasty dub and reggae in Jamaica next week! 🙂