Vampisoul Records: Essential Latin, Funk, Psych and Brazilian Vinyl Reissues

Some record labels make it easy on you. You know roughly what you are getting before the needle hits the record.

Vampisoul is not one of those labels.

The Spanish reissue label has spent years digging through music from Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Ethiopia and plenty of other places where great records have a habit of disappearing into collector lists and expensive original pressings. Their catalog jumps between salsa, psychedelic rock, funk, jazz, Latin soul, Brazilian music and records that are harder to file without inventing another section of the shop.

We have a growing stack of Vampisoul releases at Dead Tank. Here are a few places to start.

Brazilian Records Worth Knowing

Brazilian music alone can send you down enough side roads to occupy the next decade.

Jorge Ben – "Jorge Ben (1969)"

Jorge Ben's 1969 album catches him right in the middle of samba, soul and the increasingly strange Brazilian pop world developing around him. It includes the kind of rhythm section that makes a lot of rock records from the same year sound unnecessarily stiff.

If your Brazilian collection begins and ends with a couple of Tropicalia records, this is a good way to make the shelf larger.

Marcos Valle – "O Compositor e o Cantor"

Marcos Valle's catalog moves through bossa nova, samba, funk, jazz and pop without spending much time worrying about the borders between them. O Compositor e o Cantor comes from the earlier end of that story and shows why Valle became such a persistent name among Brazilian collectors.

Both of these are records where the original copies can turn record shopping into a financial planning exercise. Good reissues are considerably less annoying.

Salsa, Latin Soul and Records Built for Loud Speakers

Vampisoul's Latin catalog is where things get dangerous if you enjoy buying records you've never heard before.

Alfredo Linares – "Lo Que Tengo"

Piano-heavy Latin music with plenty of salsa, descarga and Latin soul running through it. Linares is one of those musicians whose records tend to lead directly to five more records you suddenly need.

Elia y Elizabeth – "La Onda de Elia y Elizabeth"

Elia and Elizabeth Fleta made a pair of records in Colombia in the early 1970s that barely resemble most people's idea of Colombian pop from the period. Breezy harmonies and acoustic guitars sit next to psychedelic touches, tropical rhythms and arrangements that keep wandering somewhere unexpected.

La Onda de Elia y Elizabeth gathers material from the sisters' brief recording career and makes a good argument for why their music was rediscovered decades later. It is melodic enough to work immediately, but odd enough that you start noticing something new every time through.

This is exactly the kind of record Vampisoul is good at putting back into circulation: music that somehow feels obvious once you've heard it, followed by the question of why it wasn't already sitting on your shelf.

La Fantástica – "From Ear To Ear"

Hard-driving salsa with the rough edges left intact. This is not dinner-party background music unless your dinner parties are considerably better than ours.

Then things spread out.

Roy Ayers Ubiquity – "Vibrations"

Roy Ayers is hardly an unknown quantity, but Vibrations remains a great example of how easily his music could move between jazz, soul, funk and something approaching disco without sounding like it was chasing any of them.

If you know "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" and haven't gone much further, keep going.

Lightmen – "Free As You Want To Be"

Spiritual jazz from Houston led by drummer Bubbha Thomas. The Lightmen records lived outside the mainstream jazz machinery and developed exactly the sort of cult reputation you'd expect decades later.

Loose, exploratory and considerably stranger than the phrase "1970s jazz reissue" might suggest.

Ayalew Mesfin – "Hasabe – My Worries"

Ethiopian funk, soul and rock from one of the great voices of the country's 1970s scene. Mesfin's music carries plenty of fuzz guitar and funk underneath melodies that sound nothing like the American records those instruments might initially bring to mind.

This is one of the better examples of why buying records by label sometimes works. You notice the Vampisoul logo, take a chance, and end up wondering how you'd never heard the artist before.

Perujazz – "En Vivo 2023 Gira Europea"

Peruvian jazz has its own history of pulling local rhythms and instrumentation into electric jazz, fusion and improvisation. Perujazz has been working in that space for decades.

This live recording catches the group doing what makes the whole idea work in the first place: stretching songs out until the distinction between jazz, traditional Peruvian music and outright experimentation stops being particularly useful.

Why Vampisoul Is a Label Worth Following

The best reissue labels do more than manufacture another copy of an expensive record. They make connections.

You buy a Jorge Ben LP and eventually find Marcos Valle. A salsa record sends you into Venezuelan music. Roy Ayers leads to a spiritual jazz record from Houston. Somewhere along the way an Ethiopian funk LP appears in the stack.

That is basically the appeal of Vampisoul.

There are famous records in the catalog, but plenty of the fun comes from releases that still require a little curiosity. Their reissues give those records another chance to circulate outside the group of collectors willing to spend hundreds of dollars on an original copy.

We currently have a selection of Vampisoul titles in stock at Dead Tank, with more rotating through as we can get them.

Shop Vampisoul Records at Dead Tank

If you like Latin music, Brazilian records, funk, jazz, psychedelic music or simply records that don't look exactly like the other 500 records in your collection, it is a label worth checking regularly.

And, as usual, finding one record you like will probably create a larger problem.