Hijos Del Sol

Named for the Andean corn drink and forged from a motley assortment of everything from cumbia to surf guitar, chicha was an urban Peruvian musical hybrid that sprang up in the 1960s. Psychedelic, playful and startlingly familiar, it was dance music for the masses, but it never traveled beyond Peru's confines until Barbes Records released this 2007 compilation. For fans of exotica, it doesn't get much better than this: northern inventions like wah-wah guitar encounter traditional Andean music, and neither is the same afterward.