Castello Branco emerged from an upbringing that sounds more like a parable than a conventional musician’s biography. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1986, Lucas Domênico Castello Branco Gallo spent much of his childhood inside an ecumenical monastery in the mountains of Teresópolis, where he learned guitar and developed the introspective sensibility that would define his work. After forming the São Paulo band R.Sigma, he eventually stepped into a solo career, releasing the acclaimed Sintoma (2017), Sermão (2020) and Niska (2021), while also publishing poetry and collaborating with a generation of Brazilian vocalists.

His music lives in the porous space between MPB, pop and electronica: intimate, poetic songwriting whose emotional weight survives even when stripped into a club track. That quality has made his voice particularly valuable to the organic-house world. He has collaborated with Nicola Cruz on Criançada, with Oceanvs Orientalis on Santa Teresa and Siku, and with Belgian live ensemble Stavroz on Valente, translating his distinctly Brazilian sensibility into increasingly international contexts.

There is a quiet continuity between the monastery and the dancefloor. Castello Branco’s songs rarely feel built for spectacle; they feel contemplative, spiritual and intensely human. In the Tulum-adjacent electronic scene, his role is therefore less that of a producer than a storyteller whose voice gives organic house something harder to manufacture: soul.

By the time Tulum had become shorthand for a certain kind of nocturnal mysticism, LUM was already there, helping invent the language. Born Sebastián Gandine in Argentina in 1977 and now based in Tulum, he is one of the scene's foundational figures—a producer and multidisciplinary artist whose downtempo, tribal and electronic vocabulary became associated with what is now loosely called shamanic house. His musical philosophy reaches back to a near-death experience in his late teens, which he describes as dissolving into pure consciousness, and forward into a fascination with indigenous music, botanical research and the ritual possibilities of sound. It is less a genre than a worldview: the dancefloor as a place to temporarily shed the self.

His path began in Buenos Aires's rave underground, where a Roland MC-303 became an unlikely passport to experimentation. In the late 1990s, his unconventional approach caught the attention of Gustavo Cerati, who brought him into underground live projects around the Bocanada era. Years later, Tulum became his laboratory. His Thursday-night live ritual at Nomade has run since 2014, while his influence expanded through releases on Crosstown Rebels, Kompakt, Sol Selectas and Wonderwheel. He became the first resident at Scorpios Mykonos and the first resident of Woomoon Ibiza, while appearing at Day Zero, Saga, Hï Ibiza and Pacha.

What distinguishes LUM is the sense that his music is not merely inspired by ritual but conceived as one. Field recordings, ancestral voices and hypnotic rhythms become tools for altered perception, while the jungle itself functions almost as another instrument. His career connects Argentina's experimental underground with the global Tulum ecosystem—Scorpios, Nomade, Woomoon, Tulum Tree House, Day Zero—making him not simply a participant in the scene, but one of the figures who helped give it its particular atmosphere.

Before Tulum had a soundtrack, Buenos Aires had Chancha Vía Circuito. Born Pedro Pablo Canale in Greater Buenos Aires in 1981, he emerged from the Zizek club scene with a deceptively simple proposition: take cumbia's earthy pulse, run it through dub, electronics and psychedelic processing, and let the borders between folklore and futurism dissolve. The result helped define digital cumbia and what would later become known as electro-folklore—a sound whose influence now runs through much of the organic and downtempo world. His early years were hardly glamorous: he reportedly started out running the merchandise booth at Zizek before his own records began travelling internationally.

Then, in 2013, a television series about methamphetamine, Albuquerque and moral collapse unexpectedly turned him into an international name. His remix of José Larralde's Quimey Neuquén appeared in Breaking Bad, exposing Chancha and the ZZK universe to a global audience. The irony was almost perfect: he had never watched the show, and the track eventually disappeared after rights issues—while Chancha says he never saw a dollar from the sync. By then, albums such as Río Arriba and Amansara had already established him as something considerably deeper than a novelty crossover artist.

What followed was a kind of musical cartography. Collaborations with Nicola Cruz, El Búho, Baiuca, Lido Pimienta and Chango Spasiuk expanded his vocabulary, while ayahuasca, shamanic traditions and the landscape of Latin America became recurring points of spiritual and sonic reference. Chancha's real achievement is not simply inventing a genre, but creating a bridge: between cumbia and club music, ancestral memory and digital production, Buenos Aires and the global dancefloor. It is a bridge that artists from LUM to Martha van Straaten are still crossing.

Kenta Hayashi does not so much perform as construct a band from thin air. Alone onstage, guitar in hand and loop pedal at his feet, the Japanese musician layers voice, percussion, effects and finger-drumming into a psychedelic-dub one-man orchestra, creating each sound in real time rather than relying on backing tracks. The result has earned him the suitably comic-sounding title of 444Hz Loop Pedal Ninja—and taken him from Fuji Rock and Glastonbury to Hungary’s Ozora festival and stages across dozens of countries.

Hayashi’s musical education began with a leap across the Pacific: at 18 he moved alone to the United States, eventually graduating from Hollywood’s Musicians’ Institute and spending eight years developing his craft in California. Returning to Japan in 2011, he began the solo career that would turn his technical facility into a distinctive live language. Since 2015, his touring has carried that language around the world, while his base in Berlin has placed him naturally within Europe’s alternative festival and conscious-music circuit.

Alongside the ecstatic energy of his live shows, Hayashi has developed a more meditative strand of work built around 432Hz and 444Hz tunings, Solfeggio frequencies and what he calls “sound alchemy.” It is a world of vibration, consciousness and ritual—ideas that may sit outside conventional music science, but make perfect sense within the festival culture he inhabits. In Hayashi’s hands, technology becomes almost primitive again: one musician, one instrument, and an entire orchestra emerging from the loop.

Long before electronic music entered the picture, Rodrigo Gallardo was learning the language of the Andes. Charango, zampoña, quena and guitar became the foundation for a musical vocabulary that would eventually stretch far beyond Chile, into the deep bass and hypnotic rhythms of contemporary folktrónica. As co-founder of Matanza, Gallardo spent nearly a decade developing a meeting point between indigenous instrumentation and electronic production; since launching his solo project in 2016, he has carried that philosophy onto stages across South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and beyond.

His music is less an exercise in fusion than an act of continuity. Traditional instruments sit alongside samples, heavy low-end and spacious electronic arrangements, creating a sound that feels simultaneously ancient and futuristic. A crucial milestone came with El Origen, his 2017 collaboration with Nicola Cruz on Wonderwheel Recordings—a record that connected the Chilean Andean tradition to the same international network of artists reshaping the global organic-electronic movement.

Gallardo's work carries an explicitly spiritual and ecological dimension, seeking what he describes as collective consciousness and ancestral connection. El Origen framed that impulse politically too, invoking the protection of land and water against the forces of progress. Onstage, the music becomes fully physical: Gallardo performs with a four-piece live ensemble rather than hiding behind a DJ booth. The result is folktrónica with roots, weight and purpose—music that treats the dancefloor not as an escape from history, but as a place to remember it.

Somewhere between the volcanic shores of Lake Atitlán and the underground rooms of Berlin, Santiago “Santi” Cabrera has built a musical language that exists only in the present tense. As Arteriam, he enters the stage without a script, weaving guitar and bass through loops, drum machines and electronic circuitry until the machinery begins to feel almost organic. Nothing is fixed; each layer appears, mutates and disappears in real time—an improvised journey “only captured by the Now,” inviting the listener to surrender to the moment and drift somewhere beyond the familiar.

That instinct was nurtured at Lake Atitlán, one of Guatemala’s great gathering places for conscious music, where Cabrera co-founded Wachalal Tribe, a multidisciplinary collective rooted in art, community and altered states of perception. The volcanic landscape became part of his musical vocabulary: spacious, hypnotic and deeply psychedelic. Later, Berlin offered another kind of laboratory. At Catalyst Institute for Creative Arts & Technology, he studied electronic music production and sound design, bringing formal technique to an essentially intuitive practice.

Cabrera describes Arteriam as “the pulse of life that pumps arts filtered in mandalic expressions.” It is an appropriately circular philosophy for an artist who builds music from repetition, vibration and transformation. From his early recordings to a prolific new chapter of releases, Arteriam remains less a performance than a passage—a guitar-led ritual unfolding once, and never quite the same way again.

There is something nomadic in Ulises’ music, as if every track arrived carrying dust from a distant road. Born in Argentina and eventually drawn to Berlin, the multi-instrumentalist builds slow, hypnotic worlds from South American instruments, drum machines, synthesizers and field recordings, allowing earthy percussion and ancestral voices to dissolve into psychedelic electronics. His sound seems to exist in the space between jungle and metropolis—organic matter passing through circuitry, memory becoming rhythm.

The spiritual dimension is never far beneath the surface. His breakthrough Más Allá EP, released on Sol Selectas in 2020, was conceived as an attempt to travel beyond the boundaries of ordinary mental experience. Pineal reaches towards the mystical language of the third eye; Sian takes its name from Sian Ka’an, the protected wilderness south of Tulum, where jungle, lagoon and sky seem to merge into one endless horizon. Even his Argentine heritage remains present, surfacing through edits of folk legend Atahualpa Yupanqui.

Today, Ulises moves fluidly between DJ booth, live performance and full-band ritual, with a deep catalogue on Scorpios Music alongside his Sol Selectas work. Records such as Ritual Incognito, Mirage, Mektoub and Nocturno extend his particular mythology: music as landscape, silence as architecture, rhythm as a passageway. In his hands, the dancefloor becomes less a room than a threshold—somewhere between Buenos Aires, Berlin and the ancient dream of the jungle.