Word: echeverri
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From the very beginning, the Colombian band Aterciopelados (meaning "velvety ones") was everything most Latin music was not: politically minded, overwhelmingly feminist and comically ironic. The band, made up of front woman Andrea Echeverri and bassist/producer Hector Buitrago, mixes punk, surf guitar and ska with folky Colombian styles such as vallenato, a bouncy, accordion-heavy genre. And unlike her Latin pop cohorts, Echeverri eschewed make-up and belly-baring tank tops in favor of piercings and tattoos. When the band hit the Bogota rock scene in 1991, the establishment barely knew what to make of them...
...which debuts this week, catches Aterciopelados in even better form. The album is a seamless collaboration that marries Echeverri's hypnotic vocals with Buitrago's steaming bass lines and adept arrangements. The first song, Complemento, sets the tone. On the surface, it's a catchy love song, in which the narrator describes meeting her match - or "complement." But listen closely and you'll hear updated surf guitar paired with a subtle layer of those, yes, pan flutes. Echeverri's throatiness gives it an edge. The song is sticky in all the best ways...
...More political but equally grabby is Don Dinero, the Aterciopelados's stinging critique of society's obsession with money. Buitrago's groovy bass is mixed with blaring Mexican trumpets, a touch of reverberating accordion and some twangy sounds imported from India - all while Echeverri innocently croons: "Don Dinero how I love you/Don Dinero you are the main guy." In the same vein is Oye Mujer, a pop song that takes on the idea of the over-sexualized woman. "Sex object, piece of meat with a Barbie complex," growls Echeverri in the chorus. It sounds earnest, but it isn't. Both...
...Echeverri confesses that Dresden at first seemed like a long shot as a place to create a world-class biotech company with an international research culture. The city was still "a bit backward," he says, and locals hardly spoke English. But Max Planck and the federal and state governments were pulling hard to make it work. When Cenix arrived in Dresden in 2001, it had 11 employees. By the end of that year, it had more than doubled that number and boasted scientists from eight countries. "It has been easy to attract essentially any nationality here, with perhaps two exceptions...
...organism. It's kind of like isolating the role a single flute plays in a symphony by eliminating all the flutist's notes from the score. Pharmaceutical firms can use the information gleaned from gene silencing to design more-effective drugs. Thanks to the funding and freedom Echeverri and his two collaborators, Anthony Hyman and Pierre Gonczy, have received, Cenix is now working with Bayer to screen some 6,000 genes identified by Bayer as potential targets for drug development...