BALTHVS

indie rock · jam band · electro-disco

BALTHVS is a psychedelic funk trio from Bogota, Colombia, formed in 2020 by Balthazar Aguirre on guitar and vocals, Johanna Mercuriana on bass and vocals, and Santiago Lizcano on drums. Their largely instrumental music layers surf-guitar tone and Middle Eastern melodic modes over cumbia and other Latin American rhythms, with spiritual-jazz improvisation and passages that reach into deep house, trip-hop, disco and vaporwave. The band names Khruangbin, Santana, Dick Dale, electric-period Miles Davis and the Grateful Dead among its reference points, and Aguirre has described Jerry Garcia as a central influence on his playing. BALTHVS releases material at an unusually fast pace, roughly a song a month, and has issued four full-length albums, MACROCOSM (2020), Cause & Effect (2022), Third Vibration (2023) and Harvest (2024), alongside a long run of EPs including a covers set titled In Tribute. Harvest was the first album written by all three members together and was recorded at a villa in the hills of La Mesa, Colombia. Aguirre also handles much of the group's business and production work, mixing the records and making the artwork and merchandise. The band frames its music in therapeutic terms, describing it as medicine and as an escape. It has toured well beyond Colombia, playing more than ninety cities across two dozen countries, with festival appearances including SXSW, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, Outside Lands, Electric Forest, the Montreal Jazz Festival and Iceland Airwaves, plus sessions for KEXP, the BBC and Gilles Peterson's Worldwide programme. In the United States the trio works clubs and ballrooms on the jam and psychedelic circuit, where its sets stretch the recorded arrangements into extended improvisation.

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