The story of ambient music in Bogotá, Colombia, doesn’t begin with the pandemic playlists of 2020. It goes back to the crackle of tape machines in the 1960s, when Jacqueline Nova opened a breach in Colombian music. Nova’s Creación de la tierra—a piece that merged indigenous chants with electronic circuitry—already contained many of the qualities that ambient would later claim: slowness, texture, immersion. Yet her experiments, and those of her teacher Fabio González Zuleta (author of the country’s first electroacoustic work, 1965’s Ensayo electrónico), found little resonance in a conservative Bogotá that dismissed them as “bizarre noise.”
After Nova’s death in 1975, her legacy began to be established: composers such as Ricardo Arias, Mauricio Bejarano, Andrés Posada, and others built laboratories, ensembles, and festivals that kept the spirit of electroacoustic exploration alive. These spaces weren’t just about machines; they were about rethinking the act of listening, sculpting sound in the air the way a visual artist works with clay. Also, figures like Ana María Romano have linked composition with pedagogy and feminist critique, recovering the erased names of women in sound. Carmen Gil has also expanded the practice of electroacoustics into performance and research, both as an artist and as a teacher at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.
The return to sonic experiments dwelling in slowness, silence, and introspection after lockdown was no accident: it represented the re-emergence of an ongoing issue that had persisted discreetly for decades. Today, a new generation of musicians is reflecting on the narrative possibilities of timbre and color. Increasingly, the interest in ambient music contrasts with the rise of Latincore, providing a different listening experience out of the club scene. For Bogotá’s post-pandemic ambient movement, sonic exploration is less about genre and more about sensitivity: the idea that sound can carry identity, fracture expectations, and open entirely new ways of inhabiting the world.
Today’s ambient in Bogotá carries within it the echoes of Nova’s cables, García’s reflections, and the patient work of composers who insisted that sound—no matter how strange—was a way of imagining the world anew. Here’s just a snippet of what’s happening in Bogotá’s hypnotic sonic landscape.
daadø
Daniela Cancelado’s solo project is one of the most intriguing, hypnotic, and touching from this list. With a jazz formation (she also plays in Bogotá’s neo jazz ensemble Biselad), her music is intertwined with vocal explorations, spectral piano passages, and overwhelming, emotion-filled lyrics. Influenced by the relationship between humankind and nature’s lore, as well as her feminine sensitivity, daadø’s music is deeply introspective, channeling inner reflections as a powerful force for sonic exploration. With her mellifluous register front and center in the mix, Cancelado’s compositions feel more like a living canvas on which the Bogotá-born artist wanders, discovering the quiet movement of the tree cells and the faint music of the vast tapestry of underneath mycelium. It is both enriching and hypnotic, foggy and melodic.
Mav Nuhels
Recognized for his restless experimentation across ambient, hyperpop, and club music, Mav Nuhels is an interesting artist to know. From early noise exercises to albums like Nüh (2018), Entre las riedras y las pocas (2020), or Los días más grises son todos (2023), his work drifts between dreamlike atmospheres and vibrant textures, refusing to settle into a single aesthetic. In 2025, he released Para alivianar via In-Correcto. This recent work functions as an EP featuring straightforward, rhythmic tracks that use vocals as instruments. The producer also performs as Brenda, blending Latin American rhythms with global club music like techno, phonk, and U.K. garage. Both projects show his approach to sound as a medium for emotional exploration, creating music for both dance floors and private reflection.
Las hermanas
Las Hermanas is the electronic music project of visual artist Diego Cuéllar, founded in 2014. Manipulating previously underappreciated sounds and drawing on sampling techniques, Las Hermanas transforms overlooked textures into compositions that are immersive and atmospheric, seamlessly blending elements of nostalgia and innovation. Its music draws samples from notable Latin American music genres, including baladas and boleros. Across eight releases, some issued on cassette, Cuéllar has developed a sonic language where analog warmth and digital precision converge, creating music that feels both spectral and tactile. Beyond sound, the project unfolds as a collage of distorted images, television fragments, and surreal landscapes that expand the listening experience live. Every time, Las Hermanas transforms sampling into an audiovisual journey both haunting and innovative.
Carlos Rizzi
Carlos Rizzi is a producer, performer, and multi-instrumentalist whose music merges intricate sound design, IDM-inspired beats, and a deep commitment to experimental soundscapes. His debut album Now Here Nowhere (2019), produced in Berlin, and the EP Vestigial (2020) established him as one of Colombia’s most exciting independent voices, moving fluidly between house, ambient, glitch, and noise. In 2024, Rizzi released Teselas, a second album blending glitch, breaks, and ambient music. The record uses fragmented textures to explore grief and renewal, piecing together experiences of loss like a mosaic. Rizzi oversaw every detail—production, mixing, mastering, and visual design—embedding the project with an intimate narrative integrity. He has also performed internationally, remixed fellow Latin American artists, and co-founded Sabana Records, a label for forward-thinking electronic music from the region.
Rosarito ½
Rosarito ½ is the latest artistic incarnation of musician and producer Andrés Archila. After his formative years in the electro punk band Resina Lalá—with performances at Rock al Parque, Estéreo Picnic, and Lollapalooza Chile—Archila turned toward a more introspective path, blending nostalgic melodies with samples of pre-internet soft-pop. It is a sound that drifts between ambient, trip hop, and experimental pop sensibilities. In 2024 via También, he debuted with Los Días Sin Nombre, an album meditating on contemplative life and everyday observation. This year he returns with Luz que sabe morir, a new EP exploring the tension between light and shadow, life and death, through bright synth layers, beats of textural nature, and moments of calm intimacy. Archila is also the founder of Minimantra, a space for dancefloor dissidences, and Portal Sur, a Latin American post-club label comprising Carlos Rizzi, Brazo de Reina, and Matt Emen.
caritasucia
caritasucia is the musical project and alias of Colombian composer and artist Carolina Cruz Roldán, born in Pereira and currently based in Bogotá. Her work blends folk, electronic, and experimental music with visual arts, poetry, and performance. With an interdisciplinary work ethos, caritasucia combines personal memories and cultural dialogues in her creative process. Her work dissolves genre boundaries, fusing acoustic instruments with electronic textures, field recordings from Bogotá, and samples drawn from everyday life. A rainy, lonely, afternoon, the sound of city traffic, or a fleeting conversation heard by chance become materials for immersive soundscapes on which vulnerability meets experimentation. Redefining the lines between the personal and the collective consciousness, caritasucia creates music that is both hybrid and universal, interweaving local scenes and global imaginaries. Each composition functions as a sensorial vignette, a poetic space where the city’s pulse resonates with human emotion.
dj+1
dj +1 is the Bogotá-based project of producer Gregorio Hernández de Alba, co-founder of In-Correcto and an active presence in Colombia’s experimental electronic scene. In 2023, through the Latin American label También, he released Aromáticas, an album inspired by the herbal teas his mother prepared to navigate Bogotá’s changing seasons. Each track transformed plants into sound—eerie, colorful, and cinematic—marking the arrival of a new identity that pushed electronic music toward introspection and ritual. Last year, dj +1 expanded his vision with Frutas Locales (2024), a work that reaffirmed his interest in blending personal memory with sonic abstraction, while placing him within a broader wave of Colombian producers redefining experimental electronics by reflecting on the idiosyncrasy of his country’s tropical richness. dj +1’s music avoids rigid genre categories, instead he crafts bright soundscapes on which rhythm and texture matter equally.
Iphi
Iphi (Nina Sante) is a Bogotá-born DJ and producer whose work embodies the raw pulse of the city’s south while reaching into global experimental currents. A resident of the collective Putivuelta, she has emerged as one of the most striking voices in Colombia’s Latin club scene, where guaracha collides with reggaeton, trance, R&B, and bass-heavy electronics. Her music, described as “a promise of Bogotá’s ghetto nightlife,” dissects genres only to reassemble them into euphoric, unpredictable hybrids. Yet Iphi’s range extends beyond the club. Recent projects like care.pkg (2025) reveal her interest in ambient textures and contemplative atmospheres, blending light synths, ecological samples, and slow rhythms with the intensity of her club sensibility. In performances such as the Bogotá live show Ambientes Suaves, focused on ambient, experimental and down beat, she has explored this duality, showing that her practice moves fluidly from kinetic dancefloors to meditative soundscapes. Iphi’s music is at once visceral and atmospheric, a constant negotiation between the chaos of the party and the stillness of inner worlds.
Ezmeralda
Ezmeralda is the project of artist Nicolás Vallejo, who transformed personal crisis into a spectral sonic vision after disbanding his gothic cumbia group La MiniTK del Miedo. His debut album Patrimonio Inmaterial de la Nada (2021) was born out of nights of experimentation in isolation, split between Bogotá and a cabin in the farallones of Sutatausa. Vallejo conjured landscapes of reverberation, synthesizers, tape effects, and lush echoes—music where ghosts of sound are born, dissolve, and drift between dreams and wakefulness. In May 2025, Ezmeralda released Forever Para Siempre, his fourth album. Recorded live in a single take, it gathers six pieces that hover between fragility and distortion—moments of light and melody emerging shyly through textures of noise. It stands as an intimate, lo-fi document of hope and disillusion, half intuition, half raw emotion. With these works, Ezmeralda has become a resonant voice in Colombia’s experimental ambient circuit: a creator who makes sound not only as atmosphere, but as a site of healing and inner confrontation.