As one of the few artists invited to perform at both the Bahia and Brooklyn editions of the genre-defying Afropunk Festival, Dawer x Damper have carved out a niche as young innovators on the bleeding edge of Afropunk’s founding ethos—that is, “the other Black experience.” But to get a handle on what really drives the wide-scope vision of Edwar Vergara, 29, and his younger brother Luis, 28, it helps to first explore their roots in the multihued metropolis of Cali— in particular, the rough-and-tumble barrio of Aguablanca.
“The neighborhood where we grew up—from the orange brick walls and the wooden houses to the constant noise in the streets—the whole social context is what feeds us creatively,” says Luis Vergara, aka Damper. “It’s from there that we tell our stories. Whether these are stories about love or social, cultural and ethnic issues, we see everything.”
These deep connections to community, along with the diverse musical traditions of Colombia’s Pacific coast, are what fueled the duo’s acclaimed 2022 debut Donde Machi, a concept album that draws from ultramodern hip-hop, urban soul and native Afro-Colombian styles like cumbia, currualo, bunde and Aguabajo (downstream) music. But deeper still, Dawer x Damper tap into an almost preternatural grasp of that strange intersection of style, sexuality, quirky authenticity and radical escapism—a nexus that feels uniquely familiar to fans of Prince, Pharrell Williams, Janelle Monáe and Parliament-Funkadelic, to name just a few.
“As we got older,” Damper explains, “we came across the concept of Afrofuturism. It helped us rethink the way we see our traditional music and understand why some of the artists who inspired us, like Pharrell and Funkadelic, were so musically advanced and made such an impact. In the end, you don’t create by just thinking about today. It’s also about the future. And especially for us, because we come from an Afro-Colombian background, we think about how Black people will listen to us. How they will feel identified is very important.”
After landing a Discovery Award at the 2023 Latin Alternative Music Conference, as well as a Latin Grammy nomination for their full-length Donde Machi video suite, Dawer x Damper have kept up the momentum with their latest five-song EP, Bochinche, released in March. The project was rolled out as a “mixtape,” but not in the literal old-school hip-hop sense; this is a much more professionally produced affair than what might have been chopped and screwed back in the day as just a stopgap between albums.
“The concept that runs through it is ‘gossip’ [chisme in Spanish],” Damper points out. “All the songs weren’t put together at the same time, but we noticed they all involved some element of gossip—how something happens on the corner and everybody peeks out. Everybody wants to know.” The EP’s smoothly trunk-bumping title song gives immediate and vivid substance to the rhythms of the Aguablanca neighborhood, featuring guest shouts from Cali siblings Lil Keren and Young Kalif. “When they first met with Dawer, we didn’t quite have a direction yet,” Damper says. “Then we started to shape it with another producer here named Tiago Mdok, and it really came together.”
Bochinche, as it turns out, is a triumph of seamless collaboration between like-minded artists. “Lito Quitao” is a stripped-down, hypnotic banger that highlights the vocal talent of up-and-comer La S, while “Sisas” undulates with the production stroke of Mazio, the guitarist and DJ in the original incarnation of Dawer x Damper, when the brothers were just teenagers. And then there’s the swervy, summery “Estereo”—an amped-up vehicle for singer Stanley Jackson, who crafted his razor-sharp dancehall style on the beaches of San Andrés, Colombia.
With plenty more on the horizon—including “Achachairú,” a catchy new single with Uruguayan singer-songwriter Cardellino and the Colombian group La Loquera—Dawer x Damper are hyper-aware of the role they can play in bringing worldwide attention to the Cali scene; they’ve opened their ears wide to new sounds and new producers, while staying true to the character of the community. As songwriters, they’re also breaking down barriers and directly addressing topics of ethnicity, gender and politics with an inspiring blend of strength and vulnerability that’s still rare in Afro-Latin music.
“We’re not the best advisors,” Damper is quick to admit, “but we would tell anyone who is finding their creative voice to do it—to insist, with all the strength of your heart and soul, to be stubborn, to go against the current. When you manage to break away from the cliché of what a young person should be in society, especially depending on your socio-economic status—and whatever seems crazy to you, but you deeply love to do—just do what feels good and what does good for other people as well. Do it with all the hustle you can find, so it will echo around the world.”
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