Some music projects last for long periods of time, others are just a matter of months or weekends. It is not easy to keep a band of amateur musicians together. Los Hermanos Dinamita (Dinamita Brothers), a project I joined around 2002 was one of those short duration bands. The group gained momentum during the end of the year holidays, and then faded out. Inspired by Caribbean and African sounds, the beats of Champeta, and the flow of hip hop, the Dinamita Brothers had an explosive party sound.
Two electric guitars, one bass, an electric piano, a turntable and a computer, and a lead singer, created our unique sound. I played the computer and the turntable, and experimented programming the beats using Reason (a popular software at that time), and scratching vinyls live.
This year, five of the six members of the legendary band met in Bogota again and shared some memories of our times as students at university and our short duration music project. I remembered we have videotaped some of our 2002 jams with an old Sony handycam video 8 and talked about the possibility of recovering and digitizing the audiovisual records. After some archeology work, I found a video8 tape in my home archive. I watched and digitized its content, and edited two music videos with the songs Vacile efectivo, and Sol that now are published on YouTube. As I have experimented before, doing personal and domestic media archeology using tapes, films, hard drives, notebooks and other materials is fun, and allows one to retrace and bring to live memories with rich details, colors and textures.
