Australian World/Peruvian folk soul fused with shades of Pink Floyd 70s rock and 80s underground remniscent of Talking Heads, with quirky forays down dusty blues-tinged trails and lapses into dark melancholy.

6 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Progressive Rock, LATIN: Rock en Espanol



Details:
Hey, How'zit goin'? We really appreciate you taking the time to check out our music. Thanks heaps. Were Perro Chino. We're pretty much all from Peru in South America, except for our lead singer, Shayne, who's an Aussie. Perro Chino is the slang term in Spanish for the Peruvian indigenous furless dog and it seemed a good name for us - something indigenous, a little feral and a whole lotta fun!
We've just released our debut EP/CD âSurrealâ as just an aperitif of the kind of stuff we're doing. As you can imagine, coming from South America and Australia, our musical tastes and influences really vary a lot. We all dig 70s rock with an atmospheric feel like Pink Floyd, along with something with a harder feel like Led Zep'. We're also fond of late 70s/early 80s underground such as Talking Heads, and we love the blues. Plus living in South America, you can't help but be influenced by the infectious Latino rhythms! On âSurrealâ we've tried to fuse the melancholic soul of Andean folk music with the kind of sounds we've just mentioned and also use the digeridoo from Australia to try to capture the different indigenous sounds of our home turf. You can hear the didge' in the intro' of âFluffyâ or artfully hidden in the mix of âWilderness and Darkâ and âNietzsche's Bloody Hands", giving it a lot more atmosphere. If you listen hard, you can pick it up.
But more important to us in the music making process is trying to capture the feeling you get from the lyrics. That's why it's important to us to have lyrics that either tell a story or say something. Words are powerful, but never so powerful as when they combine beautifully to convey the same emotion as does the music. Sometimes the music gets a little melancholic; other times it's really upbeat, quirky and fun. Sometimes we get a darker edge kind of similar to the Tea Party. At other times, the music gets angry about some injustice that's been committed and it'll have a touch of power to get that across. But there's always a positive side, a quiet confidence that even though life can deliver a raw deal, things are going to get better. Anyway, that's the kind of vibe you'll get off âSurrealâ. Have a listen to the tracks. It's a little bit of the far flung nooks and crannies of the world seeping through a cool, progressive 70s/80s soundtrack with an alternative edge. After you've had a listen, whether you liked it that much or not, we'd be honored if you could send us an e-mail (check out our links: http://myspace.com/perrochino and shayne_newby@yahoo.com) and give us your valuable opinion and feedback. Cheers. If you'd like some more info' on us, how we put together âSurrealâand what the story is behind the songs, feel free to read on.
Perro Chino is a collaboration between Shayne (Newby),who's from Australia (but has been a Peruvian resident for a long time) and who writes most of the songs, and Northern Peruvian guitarist Fernando Yupanqui,(we prefer to call him Fer' - it's easier!!) a native son of the city of Trujillo and a descendant of the Incas (Yupanqui is a name in Quechua, the language of the Incas).
Added to this musically-creative core unit is our drummer Ricki Vasquez, our current bassist Daniel Rodriguez and Manuel Minchola on the quena (an Andean flute) and the charango (a mandolin-sounding Andean stringed instrument with the appearance of a ukelele). Several of the songs on "Surreal" (the word "surreal" was chosen because it's spelt the same in English as in Spanish - just said differently, which kind of reflected the multi-cultural nature of the band), our debut EP/CD, feature the eerie tones of the didgeridoo, a wind instrument of the Australian Aboriginals, in the hands of intinerant, bespectacled hippie Pierre Castillo.
Shayne and Fernando, who met through mutual friends, began jamming together casually on songs that Shayne had written and it was during these sessions that things began to gel. Great collaborations thrive on mutual creative energy and respect for each others gifts, and Shayne and Fer' (what he gets called) found that the combination of Shayne's songcraft with Fer's melodic touch on the guitar, had the necessary creative spark to make something fresh and original, that both of them really dug.
After getting together with some hot up and coming musicians on the local scene in Trujillo, they decided to record a few demos. After a session in the studio, they emerged with 4 tracks, "Desgraciada" (demo), "Wilderness and Dark", "Nietzsche's Bloody Hands" and "Fluffy". Later, the decision was made to fuse Andean folk music (folklorico) along with indigenous vocal harmonies and the didgeridoo into the songs, so as to capture the multi-cultural nature of the band. Another version of "Desgraciada" was born, but this time the band was dispersed around the globe, so the logistics of making music were infinitely more complicated. "I was in Oz (Australia)" recalls Shayne, "and Fer' and myself agreed that a folk version of the song had to be done in two languages. The decision to make music in both English and Spanish was the result of people coming up to us after we were playing live and telling us how much they loved the songs, but then asking when we were going to sing them in Spanish so they could understand the lyrics. So I sent Fer' my ideas, that the song should be capture that Andean folk soul and that I was hearing this really funky, slap bass thing and stinging guitar riffs happening with it. Then he sends me back the tracks and it's been slowed down by 50, and it's totally different to what I was imagining and I'm like, "What have they done to it?" But as I listened to it, it began to grow on me, till I began to find it really infectious and the vocals started to happen. I enlisted the help of a jazz singer friend of mine, Anita Brusaschi, to do harmonies and another rock and R and B vocalist, Corey Lafatelli to add his touches and it really began to flesh out and take shape." The tracks were sent off to New Zealand to be mixed by a friend there.
"The songs were written on the road, mostly in South America. The rhythm tracks, guitars and folk instruments were laid down there as well, the vocals were done in Australia, then the percussion, hammond organ and mixing were done in N.Z.! Even though you don't always here an immediately identifiable "world music" sound, it certainly qualifies, just for the process it went through in getting made! Everywhere it's been, it kinda picks up a little bit of the vibe on the way."
When you have so many different influences, differing linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the only way a collaboration works is by trying to capture the emotion of the songs. Because no matter what culture or country we come from, at the end of the day, the emotions we feel as human beings make us one. That's one of the great lessons you pick up from traveling.So that's how it was done. "Perro Chino's music develops in new ways because we try to tune into the same emotions, which is the one thing we all understand," says Shayne." When we were recording "Nietzsche's Bloody Hands"(a dark, brooding, melancholic polemic (the live version, especially, has a Tea Party-like feel) about how Nietzsches' philosophy inspired Hitler to create his 'master race' with the resultant horrors of the holocaust) , Fer' turns to the other guys and says, "Now, I want you to imagine that your eating dinner with your family (a sacred Latino tradition), and the Gestapo knock on the door, break in and take away members of your family. How would you feel?" Then we just laid down the tracks with that vibe happening".
The songs tell different stories, some of them sad, some inspirational, some funny and some dark and despairing. "Desgraciada" is about the childhood of a young Amazonian woman Shayne met who was living in a bleak ghetto on the outskirts of a South American city. "Her boyfriend was a drug mule and he used to leave her and her baby boy in this one roomed, adobe brick, mud floored hut for weeks on end, with no food or money. And yet when you heard her story of her childhood, it was even worse. When she was two years old, her mother used to leave her and her 1 year old brother alone for days at a time while she went out partying and eventually her little brother died from malnutrition, basically. It was a shocking story of child abuse leading to a life time of abuse. So while theres's this anger in the song for the crimes commited, there's also this part where I'm saying to all the embattled mums out there, "Don't give up. Seeing your kids smiles will make all the hassles worth all the pain you're going through".
"Fluffy" is a fun, upbeat, bluesy number about South America's furless street dogs, with this rhythm Shayne got from watching the feet of this dog beat it out as it ran along the street between trash cans with a huge piece of rotten chicken skin in it's jaws. "It's got a real great feel live, that one", Shayne muses. "Makes ya wanna get really loose and break out some funky moves".
"Wilderness and Dark" recounts a spiritual journey of Fer's. Fer' had this brillant piece of music and he took it to Shayne and after getting into the vibe Fer' felt when he played it, Shayne came up with the vocal melodies and lyrics, written in metaphors ripped from the Peruvian desert coast. "When we jammed with the other guys for the first time, Fer' just told them what chords he was using and we went one, two, three......and the way it came out the first time was exactly the way we ended up recording it. South American musos (musicians) are essentially live musicians and the music really comes alive when we play live".
"The whole production - recording, mixing, and graphic art cost $250. Which was just as well, as no one in the band has any money. When we were recording, I had to give the other guys their bus fare so they could get to the gig, otherwise it just couldn't happen. Being a muso' in South America is almost a vow of poverty. You do it for the love. Which makes this release all the more special to us."
We hope you dig it as much as we do.