StereoTrópico


Visual identity / Branding / Illustration / Motion

Stereo Trópico is a live music curation project built on a single argument: that Latin tropical music is more than the mainstream stereotype allows it to be. The visual identity had to carry that argument — not just dress it.



The system starts with a hand-crafted rubber stamp, made to fit a custom typeface, then translated into digital vector and animation. The result is something that feels made by hand and controlled at the same time — saturated colours, human figures merging with tropical plants, a compressed and distorted logotype that breathes differently depending on whether it’s still or moving. Italian art director Emmaboshi described it as “warm brutalism” in a YouTube review, and the phrase stuck: raw-looking, carefully built. The identity was later featured in Visual Research 79 (March 2026), where Emmaboshi called it “visual identity in the truest sense of the word.”



A recurring central eye runs through the system — an emblem for a collective, nocturnal experience where the atmosphere is the message. The layout follows a consistent logic: illustration anchors the bottom, typography commands the top. Applied across digital flyers, Instagram posts, printed banners, and merchandise, it reads immediately wherever it appears.



Stereo Trópico has built its programming around a carefully chosen roster of guests — selectors and artists whose connection to tropical music goes deeper than the genre label. 

Nicolás Sound, born in Bogotá and Barcelona-based since 2001, brings a practice shaped by two decades of collecting across five continents — his sets move through West and East African rhythms, Brazilian music, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Asia, accumulated during a parallel career as a craniofacial surgeon. 

Red Bananna — Anna Fillat — is a vinyl collector since age fifteen whose background in anthropology and ethnomusicology shapes every selection; she curates from research as much as instinct. 

Little Beat More arrives with twenty years of digging across Europe and a particular devotion to 45s — his sound spans funk, jazz, hip hop, global beats, tropical bass, and Afrofuturism, always on vinyl. 

Lady Avocado brings the picotero culture of Barranquilla — where Latin and African rhythms fuse as a matter of daily life — and translates it into sessions built for dancing. 

El Alakrán, aka Zé Fuga, has been collecting Latin tropical vinyl since 2010: salsa, cumbia, African funk and 70s grooves from the slopes of Montjuïc. 

Payu Music — Jorge Mejía, Bogotá-born and Barcelona-based — is a vinyl collector with a taste for eclectic and fusion grooves: Brazilian electronics, cumbia, afrobeat. 

And Santiago Navas brought a live electro-tropical set alongside percussionist Miguel Guerra, joined by resident selectors Nixer and Sonikgroove for a session that traced the past and future of tropical sound in a single arc.






The connection with Little Beat More opened a door beyond Barcelona. In October 2025, Stereo Trópico was invited to play at Loop Wien as part of Little Beat More #19 — a night in Vienna that brought the project’s curatorial vision to a new city and a new audience, confirming that the argument travels.