Fiercely upfront, early raptor house rave sluiced from the archive of the sound’s world-renowned Venezuelan pioneer, Pedro Elías Corro aka DJ Babatr.

»Root Echoes« is described by Pedro Elías Corro, better known as DJ Babatr, as »a celebration of resilience, joy, and solidarity on the dancefloor.« The album offers a raw, powerful snapshot of the raptor house sound in one of its most formative and expressive periods. Carefully selected from Babatr’s personal archive, it connects ground-shaking tracks produced in Caracas between 2003 and 2007 with more recent material that keeps the genre’s pulse alive today. Recognised as a foundational figure in the creation of raptor house, Babatr shaped a style defined by its fusion of Afro-Venezuelan percussion, tribal techno, acid, Eurodance, and the street-level intensity of Caracas’ working-class neighbourhoods. His tracks spread organically through minitecas, bootleg CDs, and street parties, becoming part of the shared sonic vocabulary of a generation.

These tracks were born within the vibrant miniteca scene of early-2000s Venezuela. Known locally as changa, this was the catch-all term for the electronic dance music, house, techno, and Eurodance that powered matinées and street parties. From that ecosystem, raptor house emerged as its own distinct identity, marked by galloping rhythms, serrated synths, and hypnotic structures designed to energise and empower. Opening with 2024’s »1 2 3 4 Ladies on the Floor«, the album delivers a relentless floor-filler that fuses technoid drive with Venezuelan percussive textures – a contemporary statement of Babatr’s ability to refract global sounds through his own lens. It then moves back to 2003 with »The Tech Sounds«, where trance-like synths spiral around tough, wooden drum patterns in a track as raw and defiant as the dance floors it was built for.

These are not just tracks; they are sound documents of space, community, and survival – a genre built for collective release and celebration, echoing from the barrios of Caracas to sound systems worldwide. More recent cuts like »Let’s Do It« layer classic TR-909 kicks and echoing vocal stabs with synth work that nods to foundational techno. »You I Wanna Bass« (2005) reimagines ’90s Euro club leads with a Caracas edge. »Call Space« channels the mysticism of pre-Hispanic flutes into shrill, trance-infused riffs, pulling the listener into its own sonic ritual.

»Root Echoes« is an intimate and deliberate selection from over 700 tracks Babatr has recorded across two decades. It captures the heartbeat of a movement that never stopped – music that travelled hand to hand, through bootleg CDs, online sharing, and word of mouth – ultimately finding its way into the sets, remixes, and samples of DJs around the world, resonating across global club networks.