Puerto Rican designer/musician/DJ/babe Raquel Berrios has a thing with old things. As a DJ, she spins salsa, tropicalia, and funk from the '70s and '80s, to the delight of her fellow Brooklynites. As a stylish lady, she resuscitates other people’s throwaways into the hippest of outfits. And as Buscabulla, she samples obscure musical gems of yore in songs that are very much of the now.
Case in point: the wistful, hazy “Sono” and its retro-geometric Super 8 video. The track blends samples from Cuban psych outfit Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC with fuzz guitar, xylophone, '90s hip-hop beats, and Berrios’s own whispery vocals for a super-chill summery delight. The video, directed by Brooklyn-based set designer and visual artist Roy Delgado, perpetuates this blissful feel with washed out tropical scenery from the Botanic Garden Sculpture Park in San Juan, a hippy-meets-disco-era aesthetic, and occasional witchy vibes.
This is only Buscabulla’s second song so far (after last fall’s cover of Tite Curet Alonso’s “Tu Loco Loco y Yo Tranquilo”), though there are rumblings of an EP by the end of the year. To tide you over, peep the SONOSOLAR mixtape on her Soundcloud, which happens to feature “Sono.”