Balún
Fresh Air Fest 2023
Wapato Island Farm
15115 NW Gillihan Rd
Portland, OR 97231
Jul 8, 2023
4:00 PM PDT
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About this concert
Join us on Sauvie Island at Wapato Island Farm for a family-friendly day of picnic dinners, drinks, and a distinctly 3A lineup. The 3A String Quartet performs Roots & Strings, a program of works by Mexican, Cuban, and North & South American Indigenous composers to pay tribute to the ancestral tribes of this sacred land and to Wapato Island Farm’s roots. Then, electronic indie band Balún headlines with their musical and cultural fluency that spans from their traditional Puerto Rican roots to the dancehalls of Brooklyn.
Between sets, you can enjoy food, drinks and handmade goods from our local vendors and experience a soundwalk composed by Gerardo Calderon in response to the land, sky and tributaries of Wapato Island.
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Balún Biography
Brooklyn-based electronic indie band Balún self-identify as transnational. The quartet that broke out of the San Juan indie scene a decade ago has since undergone a formational odyssey through the industry, academia, and the stateside Puerto Rican experience. Balún’s long-awaited sophomore album Prisma Tropical focuses an incredibly wide field of genres and influences into a revelatory sound that evokes both of the band’s homes and the distance between them. Heavy doses of tiple, bomba barrel drum, and dembow work alongside loops and layers of shimmering synths to accomplish something explicitly of the island, yet fluent in the language of global pop. Tied together around the magical realism of singer Angélica Negrón’s lyrics, Balún’s deep understanding of reggaeton's Jamaican dancehall roots has transformed their shoegaze pop into “dreambow.”
Balún's new LP 'Prisma Tropical' was released July 20th 2018 via Goodchild Music and premiered on NPR’s First Listen. Their single 'La Nueva Ciudad' Premiered on Remezcla and was Spotify Latino's Song of the Day, breaking into the Viral Charts globally and in 8 countries including Spain, Mexico, Chile, & Argentina. 'Prisma Tropical' was one of NPR’s Top 50 Albums of 2018, placed #4 in Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Latin Albums of 2018, and The New York Times named “Años Atrás” one of the best 65 songs of 2018.
Read MoreBalún's new LP 'Prisma Tropical' was released July 20th 2018 via Goodchild Music and premiered on NPR’s First Listen. Their single 'La Nueva Ciudad' Premiered on Remezcla and was Spotify Latino's Song of the Day, breaking into the Viral Charts globally and in 8 countries including Spain, Mexico, Chile, & Argentina. 'Prisma Tropical' was one of NPR’s Top 50 Albums of 2018, placed #4 in Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Latin Albums of 2018, and The New York Times named “Años Atrás” one of the best 65 songs of 2018.
Dembow
Electronic
Shoegaze
Indie
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