Nemegata

One Liner: Columbian/African/I Have No Clue stew

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but cumbia, bullerengue, gaita music

Home: Austin

Poster Position: Level 5 (25) 
Weekend Two Only.
Saturday.

Thoughts:  You know the way David Byrne sounds on "Nothing But Flowers?"  Imagine that vocal tone, but singing something in Spanish as though he is the guy who chants stuff from the top of the tower in a Muslim city.  Some of this sounds like Japanese?  Is this Spanish?  Am I going to have to go research something?  Dammit.  Meuzzin - the guy who proclaims the time for prayer.  That dude.  Well, that is what their most recent single makes me think of.  This is "Pasos."  10,940 streams.

The music itself has an African vibe - like the Khruangbin stuff.  Funky and worldly, swirling and raw.  Kind of fun.  

Namegata is a city in Japan, located in the Ibaraki region.  A small town, bordered by Lake Kasumigaura to the east and Lake Kitaura to the west.  But this is Nemegata.  The band is apparently located here in Austin, despite sounding nothing like a traditional Austin thing.  The Chronicle calls it a "whiplash tabula rasa rock."  They were part of the 2022 class of the Austin Artist Development Program, and the basis of the music is apparently Columbian (with some of the language being Muisca?).  Their stream count is abysmal, so they are not getting much in the way of good traction with this mashup of traditional Columbian music, psych rock, and African rhythm, but it sounds pretty fun to me.  I just wish I understood the words.

One album 2022's Hycha Wy, and a handful of singles otherwise.  Only one other song has more than 10k streams, one of their first singles called " Si Landero Fuera a Marte."  15k streams.

Much more traditional sounding than any of the stuff that they put out later.  This single was released in 2018, and I much prefer the later stuff that gets a little freakier and psych-rock-ified.  Their website claims a new album is on the way, that is explained as so: "The new album is a powerful Afro-Indigenous Colombian shamanic journey filled with tobacco-seeped jungle sounds, eerie synthesizers, and distorted psychedelic guitars."  Yokidoki.  

Likely will not hunt them down at the Festival, but I can think of a lot worse ways to spend a sunny afternoon hour than to grooving along to whatever they are talking about.