Dick El Demasiado

No Nos Dejamos Afeitar (“We Will Not Be Shaved”) by Dick El Demasiado aka Dick Verdult is considered the first album of “Experimental Cumbia”, also known as “Lunatic Cumbias”. It has never been issued on vinyl before. Blending lo-fi 2-beat rhythms with raw electro-rock, No Nos Dejamos Afeitar emerged as a cult release, sparking a rebellious wave of experimental cumbia that echoed across generations.

Verdult was born in the Netherlands but grew up a citizen of the world, moving around through more than twenty countries, including Guatemala, Argentina, Japan, France, Spain...the list goes on. He studied film at the University of France during the agitated late ’60s and also in San Francisco with Georges Kuchar in the early ’80s. He is a sculptor, writer, multimedia artist and musician. Around 2000-2001, he began experimenting with cumbia. It started with chopping up tracks on his MPC sampler, and soon after, Verdult moved on to producing his own music and writing lyrics in Spanish. Recorded in the Netherlands, the No Nos Dejamos Afeitar CD was first released in Argentina,where he subsequently started to disorient audiences there and around the world performing with his band Los Exagerados. His song “Mecha Flan” was performed on Argentina Sports TV Channel for an audience of over 30 millions viewers in South America back when the CD was released, helping to cement his popularity in Mexico, Colombia and Peru. A documentary directed by Luuk Bouwman, Dick Verdult – It Is True But Not Here, came out in 2017 and is highly recommended to understand the fascinating life of this artist. Calar Music is exploding with joy to release this essential album. More than an LP this is a bomb, and every track is pure dynamite!

“His strange sound has gradually spread from Argentina to all over the world. ZZK, a label that specializes in digital cumbia, also announces influences by him and pays him respect by calling him ‘Cumbia King’. (...) While Dick’s sounds are naturally based on the dull and cheap 2-beat, they also relate to the US electro-rock of the ’90s such as the Butthole Surfers and Sun City Girls, as well as the west-Japan experimental rock such as Omoide Hatoba and the Boredoms.” – Shinya Matsuyama, Spa !, Japan