We’re living in strange times, where everything seems to be turned upside-down, our sense of time has become distorted, and the more connected we are, the less we really connect with each other. Now more than ever, we need a new kind of music to help us figure it all out, or at least that’s what Eduardo Cabra, a/k/a Visitante of Calle 13 fame thinks. Collaborating with Dominican singer-composer Vicente García, “Trending Tropics” dispenses with the concept of a fixed lead singer to open up a new space for creative collaboration between a carload of fascinating vocalists—some well known, others not—and a futurist design of music that fuses electronic sonic strategies with world rhythms. Cabra and García created Trending Tropics as production workshop and coaxed and reached out to famous friends like Ile, Ana Tijoux, Li Saumet, and Ziggy Marley to contribute lead vocals. The result is an exhilarating ride through the future of Latin music. The concept’s central contradiction, that you can create organic music by meditating on the alienation of a society where friends, lovers and relatives text each other rather than leave their rooms to talk, seems to work. After all, this is a project that intends to tour live with the same five-piece band that played Central Park in New York this summer with a robot standing in for a vocalist at center stage.