Inside Fred again.. and LATIN MAFIA’s 50-hour live mixtape experiment

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(From left) Latin Mafia Milton de la Rosa, Emilio de la Rosa and Mike de la Rosa with Fred again.. (Fred Gibson) and Benjy Gibson during the making of 9 months & 50 hours | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

The stream went live at one in the afternoon on July 28 under a title that read like a dare among friends: making a mixtape with LATIN MAFIA and staying here until we finish it. Over the next 50 hours of YouTube broadcast from Lago Algo, a cultural centre inside Mexico City’s Bosque de Chapultepec, British producer Fred again.. and the Mexican trio LATIN MAFIA built 9 months & 50 hours.

This they did in full view, something most other musicians prefer to keep behind the closed doors of their studios; the unglamorous middle part of making a record.

Fred again.. is bringing that same brilliance to his Indian fans with three shows in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.

The mixtape entered the Billboard Top Latin Pop Albums chart at No. 1, the year’s only chart-topping debut there and the first by a band since 2020, while landing at No. 8 on Top Latin Albums and No. 9 on Top Dance Albums.

Over the hours, as the mixtape came together, you could see everyone in the room smiling, laughing, and grooving to arrangements they had built moments ago, which is about as intimate as a music experience gets. We hear most albums in our homes, alone, long after they are polished and ready for the world. Here, we were invited to sit in the room while everything was still soft and arguable.

On July 30, the record was done. Only hours later, LATIN MAFIA and Fred again.. walked onto the stage at Palacio de los Deportes and played it to a sold-out crowd of more than 20,000. On July 31, 9 months & 50 hours was out on all streaming platforms, clocking in at around 46 minutes; the 14 tracks were released through Fred’s Atlantic imprint in association with Rimas Entertainment.

But there is a little more to the story than the 50-hour livestream. LATIN MAFIA are three brothers from Mexico City comprising Emilio, Milton, and Mike de la Rosa, and Fred had been circling them since he declared he was a fan of their 2024 debut. They traded ideas on and off for two years, hosted each other in London, and played a Mexico City show together last December. What everyone watched was a long private collaboration finally being finished, and out there for the world to see.

Fred is a master of live performance, and he has spent years building his work in public. He has debuted tracks on Twitch and released a continuous recording of every set from his USB002 tour, running to more than four days of video. This latest venture can only be seen as its fullest expression yet.

The technicalities were less improvised than the framing suggests. McIntosh, the American audio company that has been building high-end amplifiers and speakers since the late 1940s, supplied a bespoke listening system for the room, built around its XRT2.1K loudspeakers, tall floor-standing columns designed to reproduce sound with very little colouring of their own.