A universal language: Globalquerque! brings music from different parts of the world to ABQ

Music from around the world will soon fill the air in Albuquerque.

Globalquerque! returns to the Duke City on Thursday, Sept. 26, at the Albuquerque Museum Amphitheater, 2000 Mountain Road NW, with a Global Headphone Dance Party & Concert from 7 to 11 p.m. The event continues from 4 p.m. to midnight on Friday, Sept. 27, and Saturday, Sept. 28, at Civic Plaza in the heart of Downtown Albuquerque. This year’s event is free to the public.

Globalquerque! founder and director Tom Frouge credits the city of Albuquerque for keeping the event going and offering it a new home. The festival had previously been held at the National Hispanic Cultural Center for 18 years. The event is now a part of the city’s three-year Route 66 centennial celebration.

World beats: Globalquerque! brings music from different parts of the world to ABQ

“I had to step back and look at it with new eyes and try to figure out how we can present the same quality, scaled down, and kind of start rebuilding it over the next three years,” Frouge explained.

The Global Headphone Dance Party & Concert was launched in 2022 to attract a broader and younger audience.

“The bands that are going to be playing our stages this year are the hippest bands that are going to be playing in New Mexico in the month of September,” Frouge said. “They just happen to be from other countries. For instance, the opening, it’s going to have three DJs and a band in the middle of it. And (special guest NINI) is a Taiwanese woman who’s a string virtuoso. She plays every traditional Chinese instrument. She’s actually had some special ones built, and she fronts her band, (which) is basically a rock band. She’s like the guitar player but she’s playing traditional Chinese instruments. It’s just off the hook.”

Frouge said the bands that are part of Globalquerque! are making headway in the music industry and the world.

“These bands are breaking the barriers, not only of culture, but of genre,” he explained. “It’s not your grandma’s world music.”

Four bands will be featured each day on Friday, Sept. 27, and Saturday, Sept. 28, at Civic Plaza. A full list of artists and event schedule can be found at globalquerque.org.

“We have bands everywhere from Brazil to New Orleans to Sweden coming in,” Frouge said. “And we’ll also have international food trucks, and fair trade international and New Mexico vendors.”

Another component of the festival will be virtual presentations on its YouTube channel, including a documentary called “Sojourns.”

“We did (this) in conjunction with LyricFind and Red Music Rising in Canada on language and culture,” Frouge said of the documentary. “(It is) presented by (two-time Grammy winner, multiple Native American Music Award winner, composer, performer and actor) Robert Mirabal from Taos Pueblo. There’s a lot of stuff that we offer through our website and through our YouTube channel to enjoy.”

This year’s event poster created by Talis Frouge, a digital artist, designer, printmaker and animator, has a unique story of its own. It is the first time a digital artist has been selected to create the poster that was created in the risograph-style at Risolana, a not-for-profit community risograph studio located in Albuquerque’s South Valley. A limited number of the posters will be available at the festival.

“The risograph machine was created by the Riso (Kagaku Corporation) in Japan in the ’80s and it was created as a cheap copy method,” said Tom Frouge. “They would print it on really thin paper, like rice paper, and you could do really cheap copies ... A bunch of artists, in the early 2000s, got their hands on these machines, and they started creating these risographs where they would layer multiple colors ... It creates this very textured almost like Roy Lichtenstein art, almost like comic book art in a way, but not quite dot matrix. It’s a really interesting technique.”

Globalquerque! is produced by Frouge’s nonprofit Avokado Artists.

“Our mission statement is cross-cultural understanding through music and the arts,” he explained. “Globalquerque! was designed to be the physical manifestation of the nonprofit’s mission. And so hopefully we will be able to continue that in our new location, as we slowly reset it, expand it, because that’s really what it’s about. It’s a series of concerts and that’s great. But it’s more than that. We’re not just doing concerts for the sake of doing music concerts. We want to recognize our similarities while we explore and celebrate our differences.”