Less than a hundred miles inland from the capital city of Lima lies the great Peruvian jungle, an untamed land of impenetrable forests and endless winding rivers. In its isolated cities, cut off from the fashions of the capital, a unique style of music began to develop, inspired equally by the sounds of the surrounding forests, the roll of the mighty Amazon and Ucayali Rivers, and the rhythms of cumbia picked up from distant stations on transistor radios. With the arrival of electricity, a new generation of young musicians started plugging in their guitars and trading in their accordions for synthesizers: Amazonian cumbia was born.

Almas Conectadas (Connected Souls) is the sophomore album from renowned British producer Will “Quantic” Holland and Colombian folklore singer-songwriter Nidia Góngora. Bubbling with symphonic flourishes, the release explores the unique, rich, and mystical musical traditions of the Colombian Pacific Coast while being recorded at Quantic’s Brooklyn-based studio and creative powerhouse Selva.

The Cabo Verdean popular music genre of funaná is one that, up until a few years ago, had little representation in the wider global marketplace, and it’s easy to understand why. Outlawed by the Portuguese colonial government in the 1950s as too proud an expression of identity, it emerged into the local mainstream only in the 1990s, where it served as a sonic symbol of political activism during Cabo Verde’s shift to a multi-party government. In more recent years, popular sounds of the island nation have featured in several new releases – Analog Africa’s Space Echo and Legend of Funaná, Ostinato’s Synthesize the Soul – with funaná occasionally the focus.

Hits back to the '50s from Colombia's Disco Fuentes label, with history sweeping consistency aside–any gringo can tell Conjunto Tipico Vallenato's accordion side-closers are country and Rodolfo's coffee commercial isn't. But even if the accordion stuff belongs on a vallenata comp, it passes muster on a collection where at least half the songs bristle with the exigente hooks that sell classic pop the world over. And the unmistakable beat runs down a consummate South American groove, halfway between Euro clomp and Afro hipshake.

On 12 February 1949 an angry mob stormed into the centre of the Ecuadorian capital of Quito, burning the offices of the city’s main newspaper and its oldest radio station to the ground.

The four-piece band exude all the chintzy glamour of a hyper-stylised ’70s B-movie: its members hail from across the globe (Uruguay, Australia, Sweden, London), style themselves like mid-century French chanteuses and are mainly here to vibe-out, man. But their debut album is seriously captivating: a breezy, all-instrumental tour through retro global psychedelia, from cumbia to Turkish psych to scuzzy surf-rock, furnished by vintage synths and produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos. These are adventurous, evocative jams, calling to mind spaghetti western standoffs and oversized margaritas; there’s also an homage to Lindsay Lohan’s VIP beach resort, naturally (“Lindsay Goes to Mykonos”).

Killer compilation of 14 cumbia tracks from 1963 to 1983 of South-American female singers.

After the very acoustic "¿Dónde estás María?". I decided to try a new experiment taking as a reference the legendary group "Cumbia siglo XX" which is a group who explores a futuristic vision of coastal cumbia in the 80s, together with other groups such as "Grupo folclórico", "2000 voltios" and others, mainly under the label Machuca and Felito records. This new 80s cumbia was a combination of funky basses and a further evolution of the rhythms, blending this style with disco and even rock music and superimposing the traditional versus the urban context and the modernity.