Verraco and his peers in Medellín, Colombia, were once portrayed as raging revolutionaries: rebels who rose up to overthrow a hegemonic club culture and wrest electronic music from the death grip of the Global North. They named their label Insurgentes. His inaugural release, Verraco's self-titled debut EP Resistir. But over the past seven years, Verraco (a.k.a. JP López) and his crew have gone from novices to some of the underground's most famous names, kings of a scene that onlookers have dubbed – somewhat problematically – 'Latin Club'.
However, Verraco was never one of the dovecots. It's true that he used cumbia beats on his 2020 song 'Breaking Hegemonies' and sampled Zapatista icon Subcomandante Marcos on 'Hasta morir si es preciso'. Releases on his TraTraTrax label, successor to Insurgentes, are filled with Caribbean dembow, Venezuelan raptor house, Mexican tribal techno and other sounds from across Latin America and the diaspora. But TraTraTrax refuses to stick to any identity other than the one the community has invented for itself: The label that describes 2022 never mind, take it easy—the closest thing the scene had to a manifesto—as “popurrí”, a mixture of “everything and nothing, I just boiled bam full of flavor and indignation, but above all, indignation, because we don't want our wounds to heal. “
Verraco's music is equally informed by the cerebral sounds of Aphex Twin, Autechre and other UK electronic pioneers, alongside the psychedelia of artists such as James Holden and the darkside electro of Rotterdam and The Hague. This is also a kind of resistance, a way of reminding global audiences that López has as much claim to the Euro-American techno canon as any white kid in Ohio or Heidelberg. After the relative removal of the 2020 album GrailVerraco dropped his heaviest, most triumphantly unbridled work with last year's storming and utterly unorthodox Scandaloo, a double-barreled shot across the bow of club music. from now on Breathe… Godspeed, breaks out even bigger guns. The four tracks bear some relation to other contemporary Latin club anthems with their thrashing rhythms and stern sonics, but with their clean, uncompromising weirdnessthey sound a bit like anything else — from anywhere.
Rather than any given style, Verraco's work is defined by its intensity—exaggerated cues, distorted percussion, violently spinning oscillators—and the epic scale of his arrangements, which often sound less like club tracks than galactic battle anthems. Both qualities are in abundant supply on these four tracks, which feel like a single overall suite. They share a palette of muscular drums, digitally rubbed textures and extremely disorienting sound. Nothing is what it seems: the basslines growl like cyborg beasts, while the processed vocals – which fight and chatter inexplicably – could be mischievous aliens. The mood is exciting but unsettling. both the intricate design and ambiguous air of malevolence remind me of the geometric landscapes and “mechanical elves” described by many DMT users. Verraco's tracks refer to an alternate dimension of club music, where even the most familiar trope becomes excitingly strange.
