Making Movies has your Valentine’s Day recipe for love

It’s easy for a band like Making Movies to stand out in Kansas City. The foursome — Panamanian-born brothers Enrique and Diego Chi, Mexican-born Juan-Carlos Chaurand, KC-born Brendan Culp — are used to the confusion of new fans when they explain that their psych-rock and Latin-jazz fusion sprouted in decidedly unspicy Midwestern fields. They’re also quite proud of that fact.

Last March, Making Movies released the Steve Berlin–produced full-length A La Deriva, an excellent collection of highly danceable, energetic songs sung in Spanish and English. This Valentine’s Day, the band celebrates its fifth anniversary at RecordBar. We chatted with lead singer and guitarist Enrique Chi over the phone from his Kansas City home.

The Pitch: You’re playing on Valentine’s Day. Do you envision this as a great big love fest, or is this a show that all the single saps can enjoy?

Chi: I think it’ll be for both. We have the luck of having a fan family that’s really diverse. Once we start playing, the whole audience gets up to dance. Even if you’re bringing a date, that’s great — you can dance and have a good time together. I should say that there’s always more girls willing to dance than there are guys willing to dance, so if you’re a guy and you’re willing to dance, our shows are great.

Your music highlights a variety of influences, from cumbia to Afro-Cuban beats to classic American rock. People have a hard time agreeing on what genre to put you into. What gives a song a Making Movies sound?

I think our songs need to be a link between whatever shared DNA between a blues song and a Cuban song or a Mexican or Afro-­Peruvian rhythm. There’s some linked DNA. I think music shows how cultures come together.

There are similarities between music all throughout the Americas, because it’s that weird mix — a cocktail created by the African slaves coming over with whatever Europeans were bringing them over. And in Latin America, that was the Spanish, and the Spanish brought guitars, and then that mixed in with the indigenous people. So every country, every region, has its own little flavor, but there’s also some common bonds. And I guess that’s what we’re searching for: common bonds. And what we’ve found is that when we hit the nail on the head and combine those things the right way, it sounds like us, but it’s also a way to connect with thousands of people.

We grab the Latin American soil that we were born on, and take an old, traditional folk-song structure, and we rearrange it with all the ideas in music today. Electronic stuff, new-wave punk stuff that we’re into, all that stuff mixed up together. We try to find the link with all of it.

I imagine that you see some very different audiences when you take your music to different coasts and on international tours. What makes the Kansas City audience different, and why do you keep coming back to it?

I like the diversity here. With the other cities we go to — we fit more easily into Latin events, Hispanic events, because there’s more of a population or it’s more of an ingrained thing in that city, whether it’s San Antonio or L.A. There’s already a scene of Mexican-American kids who read Pitchfork and listen to mainstream radio. When we play those shows, the audience is a little more specific: more Hispanic, more Latino. When we’re in Kansas City, because there hasn’t been a scene for that kind of music yet and because there aren’t a lot of events for us to play, our audience is very mixed.

I remember when we played the Buzz’s Homegrown for the Holidays show in November, and it was for an audience for all these kids that probably had never heard a band sing in Spanish. Maybe 400 people there had heard of us, but the other 1,200 had no idea who we were. We brought El Grupo Atotonilco [a traditional folk-dance group], and they went into their dance routine, and the look on these kids’ faces — you know, 96.5 the Buzz listeners, 18-to-23-year-old people who are just there to see an indie-folk band the Mowgli’s. And their faces light up. They don’t know what they’re seeing.

That’s what makes it fun and special to us, that we get to be the vehicle that exposes them to those kinds of things. If those kids would have grown up in L.A., they probably would have already seen a performance like that at some point in their lives. So it’s a chance for us to introduce this to audiences. We can be a curator for some of this kind of stuff in Kansas City, and that makes it really special to play here.