In New York City, Zemog El Gallo Bueno release “Mania” from ¡Ya Tú Sabes! U All Reddy Noe, their seventh album released on 5 December via Pinch Records. Abraham Gomez-Delgado, the Puerto Rican and Peruvian composer leading the nine-piece, uses the song to confront the people who perform kindness face-to-face while sustaining dehumanising structures.
Gomez-Delgado was born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, with roots in Saposoa, Peru. He built the album through what he calls “composing backwards”: he gave the band skeletal sketches, a key or a rhythm, let them improvise, then cut, collaged and reshaped the sessions into final compositions. As he explains, “The raw interactions of the live band and the vocabulary it had developed over time were there from the start.”
The line-up mirrors a salsa ensemble, but the writing draws on 1970s New York salsa, free jazz, Afro-Cuban music, Brazilian funk, plus Puerto Rican plena and bomba. The name sets up the live theatrics: “Zemog” is “Gomez” spelled backwards, paired with “El Gallo Bueno” (“The Good Rooster”), and on stage the band crow like roosters with one member in a rooster costume, a choice Gomez-Delgado has linked to the spirit of Sun Ra.
On the album, earlier collaged ideas are turned into full charts the band can learn and play as complete works. “Cambiando Sol” opens with brass leading the arrangement. “Caso Por Casa” is designed to switch between salsa, merensongo and Brazilian funk. “Taíno (Por Siento)” places plena at the centre while dealing with ancestry, inherited damage, and traditions taken up in the wrong hands. Across the tracklist, the writing returns to migration, indigenous ancestry, identity, and the question of home as something made through people and practice.
“Mania” is one of the album’s bluntest moments. It sits in the same Latin X-perimental lane, shaped by collage and sharp switches, with a vocal that flips between sung phrases and a fast spoken run. The couplet “La manera… echa con mucho amor / La manía… de mezclarla con dolor” translates roughly as “the way, made with lots of love” and “the mania of mixing it with pain”, framing harm presented as care. When it jumps to “they snatch, they change, they violate you,” it stops describing the disguise and names the result.
Outside Zemog, Gomez-Delgado also runs the avant-Latin jazz big band Positive Catastrophe and works under the name Eje, continuing the same interest in improvisation, collage, and reconstruction through composition and editing.
Listen to and purchase your copy of the album HERE