Bogotá, Colombia’s Monsieur Periné are headed to the U.S. this spring with a catalogue of jazzy, folkloric, Afro-Latin pop that is offbeat enough to invite “alternative” as a shorthand and a sincere compliment.
The duo of singer Catalina García and multi-instrumentalist Santiago Prieto met in 2007. She was studying anthropology. He was studying music and production. They began playing Latin music covers before releasing their debut album, Hecho a Mano, in 2012. A slot at South by Southwest followed and, in 2015, they played an NPR Tiny Desk show that has 14 million YouTube views.
“We started making music without a plan,” García tells PureHoney. “It was fun. People were excited about what we were like.”
For their latest album, 2023’s Bolero Apocaliptico, they had a plan: to conduct a kind of experiment on their chemistry. They’ve always collaborated — with Dominican rocker Vicente García, for example, on 2015’s swinging “Nuestra Canción.” But the guests are more numerous — Brazil’s Natiruts, Chile’s Ana Tijoux and Puerto Rico’s Pedro Capó, among others — and the production is sometimes otherworldly. The lo-fi, lost-in-time strumming and metronomic knock of the opening track, “Prométeme,” signal a shift for Monsieur Periné even as Garcia’s reassuringly winsome voice bubbles up.
“We were looking for a hybrid sound,” Prieto says. “We’ve always been very acoustic, but in this case, we wanted more to go to processing, to use production to create texture and tone, a sound something like between machine and human, but without losing everything human.”
For the album’s lead single, “En La Oscuridad,” Prieto and teamed with Argentina’s Bandalos Chinos to achieve a classic orchestral disco feel that also picks up on Monsieur Periné’s roots with an opening flamenco flourish. The song ends with a bopping horn section outro that turns frenetic — like Monsieur Periné hurtling through that apocalyptic last dance.
It’s a hybrid sound suited to a fan base that spans the Americas. “We want to see everybody there to share this energy that life and music has and the power of healing,” Garcia says. “The power of expression, of freedom.”
Monsieur Periné plays at 8pm Saturday, June 8 at Miami Beach Bandshell. mperine.com ~ Olivia Feldman
