Candlelight: Tribute to Bad Bunny

Candlelight: Tribute to Bad Bunny arranges a reggaeton and Latin trap catalogue for string quartet and plays it in a room lit by candles. This is the least obvious pairing the format attempts. The music was built on programmed drums, sub-bass and a rapped or half-sung vocal, and none of those things exists in a quartet.

What does survive is the rhythm and the harmony. The dembow pattern that underpins the genre is a fixed rhythmic cell, and a quartet can play it with bow and pizzicato attacks in place of the drum machine. The chord loops beneath the vocals are short, minor-key and repetitive in a way that sits close to a chaconne, so the arrangements can treat them as a ground and build variation over the top rather than simply transcribing.

Unamplified and by candlelight, the songs lose their weight and gain their outline. Melodies carried by a voice with heavy processing come out plain, and the melancholy that runs under a lot of this catalogue, usually buried by the low end, is left in the open.