Beatbox electro Latino pop by a young Mexican/New Yorker duo (US/Mexico)

While living in Mexico City in 1980, young New Yorker Lyndell Brookhouse had a chance encounter in an all-night diner, which would change her life forever. She met a group of punks that included Eddie Rubello, and was swept into the wild local underground scene. The pair then moved to Lyndell’s home in NYC’s Lower East Side and joined the explorative downtown art scene of the early ‘80s. “If you were a painter, you were also in a band, and if you were a musician you also painted or made films” says Lyndell, “these were extraordinary times: the rise of a nurturing community with hundreds of artists (from which international celebrities such as Basquiat, Keith Haring & Madonna emerged), a community that supported art for art’s sake, before cell phones, fine dining and the internet. This is where Volti was born”.
 
Eddie quickly mastered a Commodore 64 (one of the earliest personal computers) plus some cutting-edge ‘80s equipment, and they started making tracks. They were fresh kids creating Mexican-flavored electronic music in a NY music scene which, at the time, was generally considered dark and underground. They rubbed shoulders with the likes of ESG, Liquid Liquid & others, and played in many venues including Danceteria, The Pyramid, CBGBs, Limelight and Peppermint Lounge. Volti would also regularly return to Mexico and play clubs such as Hip70 and Nueve, and also performed on Mexico TV with Univision. So Volti were Lyndell on vocals & keyboards, Eddie on bass, drum machine & keyboards, plus added guests usually playing horns or Latin percussion. They shared a rehearsal space with cult band Konk, whose drummer Geordie Gillespie encouraged them and helped record the early tracks that Volti would later take to Europe.
 
Lyndell: “We were hoping to find a new audience that would get our sound. Having heard about Crammed Discs from San Francisco connections, we went to meet Marc Hollander, and he saw something which was different, electronic Latin pop with a NY edge”. Starting from the initial NYC recordings, Volti added more tracks and elements (including a wild piano, solo by Vincent Kenis), and the songs were mixed in Brussels by the legendary Mark Kamins (the DJ who discovered Madonna and produced her first single) with the Crammed team of Gilles Martin, Kenis & Hollander.
 
Volti then started working on a full-length album, but Eddie’s untimely death brought the story to a close. This reissue includes the tracks from the original Corazón/Money Bucks EP, plus New York (which came out on a Crammed compilation) and Sunny Sunday, a previously unreleased song.
 
“Volti, a multinational band with iterations in Mexico City and New York—where they performed at Downtown clubs like Danceteria—taps into the '80s exotica craze with their salsa-flavored downtempo track Corazón.” (Resident Advisor, 2021)