This Brooklyn band specializes in the little-known form of chicha, which takes Peruvian folk styles and incorporates elements of Cuban and American pop and surf guitar music. Chicha Libre is an anomaly, a modern American band playing a kind of music that was popular among the working classes of northern Peru in the 1960s and 70s. If the style of music they play were a star, they would be a planet that arrived to orbit it decades after it faded out. It's a phenomenon that's grown in the last ten years: Western bands building their music on an obscure, vaguely familiar blueprint from outside their own culture. There are scores of North American and European Afrobeat bands, and Dengue Fever pattern themselves on Cambodian garage rock. It's cultural imperialism in reverse; these bands embrace the sometimes-unexpected way in which musicians in other countries interpreted our own music and use it as inspiration.
