Join us this Friday at JACCC for a conversation, listening party, and dance from the great LA-based Latin music label ZZK Records.

Anyone who has spent any time in Los Angeles knows that Latin music pulses through the heart of the city. While not as visible within the entertainment capital’s film industry or even the Billboard charts, Latin genres like cumbia, salsa, reggaeton, and more can be heard across town blasting from portable speakers by taco stands, car stereos, street markets, and various dance clubs. While many of the sounds you might casually encounter in the city tend to veer towards the more classic or traditional Latin songs, there also exists a vibrant community of artists and musicians creating forward-thinking music drawing from a rich history of musical cultures and traditions from across Latin America.

ZZK Records is a homegrown LA-based record label and artist collective born out of the Zizek Club nights in Buenos Aires. Founded in 2008 by Texan Grant C. Dull, Argentines Guillermo Canale & Diego Bulacio, the label has spent more than 15 years at the forefront of Latin music, carving out space for artists putting a futuristic (and often electronic) spin on classic rhythms and folklore traditions. The label regularly presents shows around the city at venues like The Echo, Echoplex, and Lodge Room, while also sharing the stories and history behind the music through their ZZK Culture and ZZK Films channels.

Watch a short documentary on the history of the legendary label below (make sure English subtitles are turned on):

“We were all starting to investigate more folk music and Latin American roots, the cumbia of folklore, mestizo beats from all over Latin America.”

This Friday, ZZK Records will be joining In Sheep’s Clothing for the first event of our new “In Conversation” series at JACCC’s Japanese garden. Join the team behind In Sheep’s Clothing and ZZK Records’ Grant C. Dull for a listening party and conversation diving into the history of the label, inspirations, desert island discs, and a closing dance party!

Tickets are available now: https://jaccc.org/events/in-conversation-zzk-records-contemporary-latin-music-a-listening-party/

In anticipation of the event, ZZK Records’ Grant C. Dull has shared a preview of some of the music that you might hear on Friday along with handwritten descriptions about each track.

Jose Larralde – Quimey Neuquen – (Chancha Via Circuito Remix) (2010)

Back in 2009/2010 when we operated more like a collective and less like a record label – we were still figuring out how the music industry worked – the creative hub of our operations was a 2 story house in the Villa Crespo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Pedro alias Chancha Via Circuito lived on the roof for a while in a small, hot room and made his sophomore album, Rio Arriba, in the dining room we used as an office for multiple creative and professional endeavors. One day he called me in the room and played a track for me. It was haunting, beautiful, deep and inevitably would be the opening track on his album, which was our first critically acclaimed album and which Pitchfork called “a dreamy, neo-primitive mix of chopped-up pan flutes, folk guitar, Coke-bottle percussion, and booming, electronically treated drums– an almost shamanistic sound that carries its own landscape: underbrush, riverbanks, campfires.” This track would eventually be synched on Breaking Bad’s final season and Chancha’s sets would become favorites to dancers around the world. Look out for his LA show later this year!

Nicola Cruz – Cumbia del Olvido (2015)

When Nicola reached out via email in 2013 he had 4-5 tracks for an EP and said he was a fan of Chancha and ZZK’s representation of electronic music in Latin America. After a couple of back and forths, we both realized he was ready for an LP. So he went back to the studio and 5 months later delivered his debut album, Prender el Alma, from track 1 to 10. We didn’t touch a thing. This slow rolling cumbia banger eventually became the stand-out hit on the album and Nicola Cruz gave ZZK some wind beneath our sails at the very moment we almost had to close shop, thank goodness we didn’t.

Son Rompe Pera – Pajaro Chogui (2020)

Back in 2018 I had just got back home to Buenos Aires after spending months on the road in South America, mostly Ecuador and Brazil when I woke up on one Saturday and my phone was blowing up by two music colleagues telling me they had just seen the raddest band ever: The marimba playing brothers from Mexico City, Son Rompe Pera. I quickly figured out their manager was an old friend and asked why he didn’t invite me to the show – “You’re never home!” completely tracked as his response and so I asked him to send me the record. I must have listened to Batuco 40 times over the next month and eventually called him back up and said, let’s put this out together. Months later, on my first day in Los Angeles, July 1, 2019, I landed at LAX, got out of the uber with 4 suitcases in tow, connected to the wifi and the first email waiting in my inbox, was the signed contract from the first Mexican band on the label. LA was looking like a good move.

Luzmila Carpio – “Sumaq Kawsay Mañarimuy – Pide un Buen Vivir” (2023)

Luzmila Carpio is the first legacy artist we’ve worked with. She’s a 70 something indigenous woman from Bolivia who sings in both her native Aymara-Quechua language. She called me in 2017 and asked for a coffee meeting the day before she left Buenos Aires where she had just performed a sold out show at the largest cultural center in the Americas, an ex Post Office turned 10 floor cultural hub, the CC Kirchner. She said she was ready to produce another album – her first in over a decade – and asked me if I had a producer for her. I did, Leonardo Martinelli from the seminal ZZK band, Tremor. I called Leo and he accepted on the spot. 6 years later, Inti Watana came out. This song signifies why I think she called ZZK and Leo, a forward thinking tribal ode to her Bolivian land and deities. In Luzmila’s words – “She speaks directly to the Chhullupia, the traditional guardian of the rain, she references the proverbial Good Life, reminding us all that a life of peace, harmony and plenty can only be attained by staying close to nature and its ancient rhythms.”

El Leon Pardo – Sofi Entre Constelaciones (2025)

This is the kind of track that exemplifies the MO of the label. Take risks, push forward, don’t follow trends, support artists who are pushing culture into new frontiers. That’s not an easy formula to stick to, especially in these wild times where paying your bills as an independent artist is becoming harder and harder, but it’s a vision we’ll always follow at ZZK. El Leon Pardo is the kind of artist we want to support, however we can. In Jorge alias El Leon Pardo’s words – “For a while when I was composing this album I was living in a house where there was a cat called Sophie. I started to think about that article about the extra-terrestrial race in “Urmah” and I imagined that Sophie was one of them, travelling around the universe, and that’s how this song came about.”