Rigo Tovar was one of the most experienced cumbia performers of his time. Although this genre was underrated for decades and considered only worthy of neighborhood parties in Mexico, Tovar took this music to an unsuspected level, and recognizing this contribution is one of the purposes of the new album by Mexican DJ Camilo Lara.

“Rigo was a great guy, crazy and brilliant, and like any genius, he had his crazy things and his certainties,” said Camilo. “A good teacher to learn from.”

Camilo, also known as Instituto Mexicano del Sonido, teamed up for this project with the Colombian DJ Eblis Álvarez—or Meridian Brothers—who, like him, is a musician who works alone, and not a group, as one might think despite the stage names they both adopted.

The album they both created is called “Ruido Tovar”—a nod to the name of the famous Mexican musician and singer who died in 2005 at the age of 58—, a tribute to tropical futurism and cumbia from the early 1980s in Mexico and Colombia.

This material has its origin in the many-year relationship between Camilo and Eblis, in addition to the similarity in the trajectories and tastes of both.

“We have always been in the world of experimental tropical music,” Camilo said. “It kind of got to a point where it made sense for us to get together.”

And if all this were not enough, Eblis is married to a Mexican, so there was not much to explain regarding who Rigo Tovar was and the influence he had on Mexican tropical music from the time he lived to date.

Honors to an experiment

And one of the greatest contributions of this artist, originally from Matamoros, in the state of Tamaulipas, was the use of synthesizers in his music, an addition to cumbia that few would have dared to integrate when this genre only included acoustic and orchestral instruments.

That is why the pair came to the conclusion that they wanted to make an album that had as its starting point the experimentation of cumbia from the seventies and eighties, with synthesizers and other electronic instruments.

Another element of the album worth highlighting is “Ritmo Babilonia”, a song with a funk sound inspired by Rigo Tovar's 1981 classic, “El festival de mi pueblo”. The celebrated American singer-songwriter and producer, Beck, collaborates on it.

Beck and Camilo have also been friends for years, and it was Beck himself who was interested in doing a collaboration with Camilo, who in turn was a fan of the singer-songwriter since his beginnings in Mexico City, where he is originally from.

The American DJ attributes his love for Latin music to his childhood in East Los Angeles, when he heard cumbia in stores, in passing cars, and on the streets.

“When you work with great artists who have good taste and musical sensitivity, the song practically emerges by itself,” Beck said in a statement. “The first impression is the right one because you are in the right place at the right time, with the right people; that is precisely how ‘Ritmo Babilonia’ came about.”

Currently, Camilo and Eblis are touring with this album through Europe, Mexico and the United States. They travel with a band of more than a dozen artists and each one presents their own work separately. In the end there is a set with the two together. On August 5 they will perform at The Regent, in Los Angeles.

Camilo hopes to be an innovator, like Rigo Tovar one day was, and although he is reluctant to declare it, he would like future generations to see him as he sees Rigo.

“I hope so,” he said. “I hope to be half as great as Rigo was.”