“Mínimo aporte a la cultura” EP by Café Velorio: A Fragmented Masterpiece from Uruguay

Café Velorio, the Uruguayan band from Montevideo, releases their third record, “Mínimo aporte a la cultura” (Minimum Contribution to Culture), a five-song EP that violates linearism and embraces fragmentation. However, the record isn't a conventional concept album, more of a puzzle of broken mirrors with lyrical fragments and musical motifs appearing in a multitude of new contexts. Elements of shipwreck, justice, memory, desire, and distance tie songs together that are anything other than isolated, but do reconstitute across the record. The captivating cover art of a young woman surrendering to water wraps around the notion of distance, as a form of benevolent acceptance over faced defeat.

As for the songs themselves, they negotiate complex narratives: "Todo Mal en Nombre del Bien" opens up with a conversation inspired by the book A Clockwork Orange, in which it deals with institutional violence and declines into a foreshadowing of the shipwreck of the Bertram 37, a real shipwreck that appears metaphorically in a different context in No Hype, where fading memories of are cast as a boat without a rudder lost at sea.

Plancha de Metal includes snarky commentary, sexuality, and an homage to Tony Iommi that positions the personal in the bigger picture of rock’s collective history. Even Fabien was prepared to provide the tone with an atmospheric opener to prepare the listener for the EP’s maze-like connections. 

Nicolás Weiss

Café Velorio, led by Nicolás Weiss (composition, production, multi-instrumentalist) and Lucía Schellemberg (voice), remains a studio-based project that has never performed live; it's all about the multiple layers of experience, and don't forget about that sonic storytelling. 

Lucía Schellemberg

With "Mínimo aporte a la cultura," they have organized the making of an unsettling and thought-provoking collection of work, far from minimal; it's a cultural statement.

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