Manu Chao Launches Benefit Project

Employs Radiohead's pay-what-you-want payment strategy. Cough up the bucks, folks!

By Blurt Staff

Latin/worldbeat rocker Manu Chao has announced the release of the "La Colifata" benefit project. La Colifata is a unique Buenos Aires-based radio station, broadcast from a psychiatric hospital, and Chao has been working with La Colifata for five years. He recently produced an album recorded by the station's members. (The hospital's residents, "Los Colifatos," also appeared in Emir Kusturiça's music video for Chao's "Rainin' In Paradize," the breakout track from his acclaimed 2007 album La Radiolina (on the respected Nacional label).

La Colifata is available now at http://VivalaColifata.org. Chao and La Colifata launched the website VivaLaColifata.org in order to help the station and hospital with their unique approach. Fans can purchase the album with a "pay what you want" donation in order to support the hospital in whatever manner they can afford.

According to La Colifata, it was "created in 1991 as a unique establishment that uses media (radio/TV) as therapeutic treatment,  somewhere between clinical and social treatment. It is a resource between the clinical and external worlds that allows Los Colifatos to recreate the social link with people living outside the hospital."

Said Chao, in a statement,"La Colifata is quite a special station as it is broadcast from a psychiatric hospital. With the help of a few friends, the patients decided to launch this radio station to express themselves. To relieve everything they have inside, and to speak to the world. While I met them five or six years ago, the station has been running this way for more than 15 years. I simply could not believe it when I read their stories."

Added Chao's label, of the album, "The project features 20 songs to laugh to, cry to, meditate to. they're about life, death, mothers, loneliness, love, tango, the pope, the end of the world, the sun and crazy grandmas. a crazy trip in this crazy world."

Amen.