Flash Amazonas

Colombian and Japanese art-pop duo, Flash Amazonas mix DIY punk bolero, scrappy Latin no-wave and the absurdist fervor of early Talking Heads on new album uva-uva, the debut release on new label, 60Nice.

Named after an Ecuadorian money transfer business, self-conceded "modern band emulating a 90s band, emulating a 60s band”, Flash Amazonas evoke the esoteric psychedelia of Connan Mockasin with the social satire of Ohio new-wave five-piece Devo on uva-uva, an eleven track medley of apocalyptic Spanish and Japanese-language lyrical theatre and hyperbolic existential realism.
 
First crossing paths at Red Bull Music Academy in 2015, the story of Julián Mayorga & Ryota Miyake aka Flash Amazonas, is a tale that travels from Montreal, Tokyo, Madrid and Ibagué. Meeting at a two-week residency in Montreal, Colombian avant-pop quirksmith, Julián Mayorga and prolific Japanese producer/multi-instrumentalist, Ryota Miyake (Crystal, Sparrows) returned to their respective homes in Madrid and Tokyo with nothing but a wav of wonky futuristic bolero and an old CD-R of Mayorga’s, handed to Miyake on his way to the airport. Two weeks later, the two unknowingly started working on their first record, Binary Birds (2019) and later, uva-uva, a name Mayorga explains is mocking old cheesy, gringo, 60s pop bands in suits and bow ties, singing about love and heartbreak. Uva also means grape in Spanish – “I imagine this album tasting like bubblegum-flavoured grape” says Mayorga.
 
“A garden of thousands of refrigerators and brass plants spread across the highways” sings Mayorga on Cuando vuelva a Ibagué en 2060, a gloomy vision of death in the family upon his return to his decaying home town, Ibagué in the year 2060. Below scattershot rhythms and jerky synth/guitar lines, previous Meridian Brothers collaborator, Mayorga’s sardonic, frenzied lyrics written in both Spanish and Japanese (using Google Translate’s voice recognition) fable bizarre accounts from murder scenes on ballroom dancefloors (Ballroom) to alien insect attacks (Hormigas culonas).
 
“I like to think about music as material. I like to work with something I can touch, its edges, its restrictions etc. Pop music is like this, but in my case, I want to break it. I want to smash it and play with it. What can I say for the material to explode”.
 
On first single, Panda (Gang), a gang of exercise-obsessed old age pensioners plot to poison Mayorga and Miyake over classic, mid 1990s Beck-esque riffs plodding along prickly melodies and synthetic trumpets – check out the music video. Ululo (I howl), is a high-velocity political number referencing gusanos (worms), the term working class Cubans describe anti-Castro, Miami Beach types (“its larvae tempt me but I dodge them”), tipping its hat to English punk groups, Buzzcocks and The Ruts but also contemporary punk tellers like King Krule. La Reina es un lagarto (The Queen Is a Lizard) is a post-pandemic conspiracy theorists fever dream of vaccine questions, reptilian overlords and Michael Jackson moonwalking controversy, set to a jarring & grimy Brazilian samba, not dissimilar to Sao Paulo guitarist Kiko Dinucci’s Rastilho LP from 2020.
 
Growing up at either end of well over 14,000km and a twenty-hour flight between them, two outsider artists in their respective worlds, who have met only 3 times face-to-face, in 7 years are growing to compliment each other perfectly. “Japanese and Colombians don’t like to impose. We are both very polite people and rather ask than act. It means he will let me do what I want and I will let him do what he wants.”