Las Malas Amistades were born in 1994 when several art and film students at Colombia's largest public university got together to make an informal, spontaneous, private sort of music, and began writing songs collectively, documenting their sessions on a friend’s four-track. Their influences included everything from indie rock to Spanish-speaking crooners of the 60s and 70s such as Raphael, José José, and José Luis Rodríguez “El Puma,” all kinds of tropical music (Joe Arroyo, Willie Colón), and the soundtrack music of Morricone and Michael Nyman, together with ideas learned from the Fluxus artists and the Brazilian Anthropophagist avant-garde. They wanted to change their world while remaining faceless.
Their first, self-titled CD has been a favorite at Psych-o-Path ever since its release in 2001, a collection of brilliant pop miniatures in the tradition of Young Marble Giants’ “Colossal Youth.” Since then, the members of Las Malas Amistades have scattered throughout the Americas, but they remain good friends and regroup sporadically in their native Bogotá to share their experiences and write and record new music. The eighteen songs on “Jardin Interior” are the results of their most recent gathering, in March of 2005. “Jardín Interior” weds minimalist pop with the homespun clatter of The Scene Is Now circa “Yellow Sarong,” and the four-track experiments of LAFMS and The Residents. It’s also a uniquely Colombian record. Like Bogotá, the music is an unlikely combination of happiness and melancholy. The city is high in the mountains of a tropical country, so it's cold and warm and sunny and full of beautiful endless clouds; so is the music.
Las Malas Amistades’ original member Manuel Kalmanovitz Gonzalez did the art cover and cd layout. Mastering by Brendon Anderegg.
-- Loy Fankboner