Artist Profile: Rolando Bruno

Cumbia trash. Hold the second word in your mouth. Rolando Bruno has a song called "Supermercado Chino." Its title tells you a lot about him before you've even heard a note. A Chinese mini-mart in Buenos Aires at one in the morning. Its fluorescent tubes humming, plastic-wrapped knockoff toys lining the shelves, snacks with the wrong country's labels, a small TV in the corner playing badly dubbed ALF on a static channel nobody's bothered to fix for decades. That is the air Bruno's records breathe.

Most artists spend careers trying to avoid the accusation that what they make is trash. Instead, Bruno picked it up off the floor and welded it to the side of Cumbia like a stolen hood ornament. In Argentina, the gesture cuts particularly deep. Cumbia has spent decades being called trash by the rock-nacional middle class, too cheap, too working-class for the bourgeois palate, with a suspiciously Andean accent the rock canon never wanted to hear. Bruno comes from the southern zone of Buenos Aires, the working-class zona sur, born in 1977. His version of Cumbia is faster, weirder, cheaper, more confrontational, and more aware of its own ridiculous textures. It owns the slur.

A Bruno song typically opens with a backing track programmed at home, featuring General MIDI bass and a brittle hi-hat over a plasticky güiro pattern. Over a scaffolding that sounds like it was made with a free karaoke app in 1996 comes the guitar, and it's the part that's really gotten good. Real fuzz pedal in a real signal chain, played by a hand who studied how Los Mirlos and Los Destellos bent their chicha leads. It's this seam between the karaoke backing and the analog guitar where cumbia trash actually lives as a willed mismatch. Bruno calls his rig the Orquesta MIDI and tours it solo with a guitar over his shoulder and backing files running off an iPad. There's also an ALF puppet on a stand that keeps him company on stage. If you think about it, ALF is the perfect object of Bruno-fied kitsch. A brown-orange Cold War-era American sitcom alien, ubiquitous on dubbed Latin American TV in the late 1980s, a household-imported intruder who lived with a suburban family while commenting ironically on their lifestyle from inside it. The position is exactly Bruno's: an Argentine garage musician living inside Peruvian chicha and sending up its conventions from within.

The Peruvian chicha that anchors the whole project came to Bruno through a homemade compilation. In 2007, a DJ named Sonido Martines handed him a CD in a record shop in the Abasto district of Buenos Aires. It was a homemade compilation of Peruvian seven-inch records titled Chicha for the Jet Set.

What Bruno ultimately wanted to make gradually appeared. The 2012 EP Presentando a Rolando Bruno y su Orquesta Midi introduced the rig, and the 2013 covers set Cumbia Reactionrewired songs by The Third Bardo, The Music Machine, Wau y Los Arrrghs and Chile's Alan y sus Bates as chicha-tinted cumbias. Bailazo in 2015 (reissued in February 2026) on Reverend Beat-Man's Swiss label Voodoo Rhythm, locked the sound in. Track titles included "Thai Cumbia," "Falafel King," "Supermercado Chino", and "Fiesta Trashera." As you can see, the supermarket reference was never accidental.

The same year, Bruno assembled El Grupo Arévalo. Eight Buenos Aires players were drawn from underground bands including Les Mentettes, Alfonso El Pintor, Antropofónica and Pecera.El Mundo Está Cumbiando, released in 2019 through Portugal's Groovie Records, was the band's first full-length.

In 2024, Cosas Raras was the moment the lid came off. The album dips into Arabic scales, flamenco gestures, Afro disco, Japanese pop, and Dominican merengue. Lead single "Merentrash" reimagines merengue as a Miami nightclub record from 1989. Elsewhere, the album wanders through baladas and tropical noir. The album placed Bruno in the company of Meridian Brothers, Frente Cumbiero, Chicha Libre and Money Chicha, the cohort of analog tropical eccentrics currently rebuilding Latin American genre fiction.

Since Cosas Raras, Bruno has released a handful of singles and live recordings, including Rolando Bruno Live in El Lokal Zurich. This month, two cheeky covers appeared, one of Nirvana's "Breed." The other: Pantera's thrash anthem "Cowboys From Hell".

It's difficult to convey in writing what cumbia trash does when you put it in a full room. Bruno's running self-description places him between two audiences he calls his rockeros and his cumbieros, and the live show refuses to pick either. Originals slide into surreal covers, before a sudden Ramones quote drops. Festival appearances range from a Cumbia DJ set at Fuji Rock to Tübingen's Cine Latino, with Spain's Funtastic Dracula Carnival and Surf-O-Rama also on the map.

On July 3, Bruno's tropical weirdness, Cumbia, fuzz guitars, and trademark chaos, temporarily relocate this strange corner of South America to Control Club. Though the night will feature the solo Orquesta MIDI configuration rather than the full Grupo Arévalo, the big room will work the way Bruno's rooms always work, with a backing track sounding a fraction too cheap for the guitar that joins it, a man in his late forties with a stage altar of imported puppet playing chicha leads with the mouth of a comedian. Somewhere around the third song, the dancers will figure out that they're at a midnight Argentine-Chinese mini-mart of the soul, fluorescent tubes humming over the cumbia trash Bruno has spent his career arranging on the shelves.