BENJA SOTO

Santiago, Chile · b. 1998 · FARA Records

BENJA SOTO (Benjamín Soto Vergara, b. 15 March 1998) is from Santiago — a huge, dry, hard-working Southern Cone city with the Andes standing over it like a wall, and about as far from the Caribbean as it is possible to get and still be in Latin America. Five thousand kilometres, and a different ocean. He grew up on rooftops in the long dusty summers, on cumbia at family parties and on reggaetón coming out of every car in the neighbourhood — music made on islands he had never seen, in a heat he recognised completely. What got him was the dembow: the realisation that a single rhythm, looped and never stopped, can hold an entire emotional life inside it, and that you can put anything on top of it, including the truth.

A warm male lead with real emotional range — swagger and vulnerability in the same breath, which is the whole appeal. He sings ahead of the beat in classic reggaetón flow, in natural mid-phrase Spanglish, with ad-libs used as structural punctuation rather than decoration. Under him: an unbroken dembow, Caribbean brass stabbing on every offbeat, a modern trap low-end beneath warm acoustic Caribbean percussion, and an acoustic bachata guitar in the romantic tradition when the beat finally gets out of the way. Caribbean warmth on top of trap weight.

He sings reggaetón in the pan-Caribbean register rather than in Chilean Spanish — which is what a great many Chilean urbano artists actually do, and a thing that scene argues about openly. His position is that the dembow was never Chilean either, and that music travels faster than borders do: he isn't pretending to be from San Juan, he's singing in the language the music is written in. Joyful and completely open, with no interest in being cool — a man having an enormous time and admitting to every feeling he has while he does it. Warm, alive, unashamed.