Since 2019 Buenört Collective have been using their platform to create welcoming spaces to explore multiculturalism—specifically, the fantastic variety of Afro-Latinx music. This Chicago-based group of multidisciplinary artists and DJs describe themselves as a record label, a booking agency, and a party incubator, and their latest project is Las Flores del Ahora, the long-awaited fourth album by avant-garde flamenco group El Sombrero del Abuelo.
The idea for the collective, whose name is a Spanish-language pun on “Malört,” arose in 2018, when a group of four friends—Hayes, Buhler, McNulty, and Bello—realized they had similar philosophies about music, art, and nightlife. They decided to use their knowledge, tools, and time to introduce underground music to new audiences, creating fun atmospheres and experiences with uncommon sounds.
Before the pandemic put a halt to basically any artistic venture that gathered people in a space, Buenört were busily curating events, among them the ongoing Eclecteque series and a semiregular night called Heavy Salsa Mama with Bello and Daniel Villarreal (from Dos Santos and the Los Sundowns). When COVID lockdowns began, Buenört decided to expand their Bandcamp page to share music from artists outside the collective. They also used some of their unexpected downtime, in Bello’s words, to “reflect on what art and media mean in our actual reality, and how we can have a better understanding of the transcendency of human communication.”
For now Buenört’s goal is to keep collaborating with artists interested in their concepts. They want to provide a platform to expose and explore global sounds incubated locally. “Latin music in Chicago has a great well,” Bello says. “Just seeing how the concept of Dos Santos, for example, has grown in the last years . . . is living proof of how far the local Latin scene can go. We hope our contribution will help to make it more robust and reflexive about its own identity.” v
