Despite the attention given to the transnational circulation of Andean music, its reception and adoption by European musicians have been rarely researched. This article focuses on the specific case of Italy, where the Andean music boom blended with that of the New Chilean Song in exile (1973–89) and where, in addition, repertoires and practices of both musics were adopted by dozens of local groups formed by young Italians. Those Italian groups – with their performative strategies and their choices of repertoires – provide a privileged lookout about how different representations of the andeaneity (the Nueva Canción Chilena with its ethical and political connotations, the musique des Andes of the French matrix, the autóctonas indigenist currents) interacted in creating an Italian imagery of the Andes. They also suggest how the adoption of ‘someone else's music’ can act, with its transcultural complexity, in the elaboration of personal narratives of identity.

Latin American folkloric-popular music had an impact on the music scenes of both Germanies, where singer-songwriters emerged and became interested in Chilean Nueva Canción, the Argentinian Movimiento del Nuevo Cancionero, and Cuban Nueva Trova in the 1970s. Particularly interesting in this context is the contact of some Latin American countries with the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on translation theory and articles on Nueva Canción in Europe, this article examines the Latin American presence at the Political Song Festival in East Berlin and analyses some publications that focus on this annual event. The article focuses on the singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne, who during the 1980s, took Nicaragua as a political example, as is shown in songs, and who also composed German lyrics to melodies by Violeta Parra, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Silvio Rodríguez, transferring the songs into a new context.

This article focuses on one of the earliest truly international Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festivals: the Eclipse Rave in Arica, in the Chilean Atacama Desert in November 1994. As a collaboration of mainly German and Chilean individuals, the event was confronted with a multitude of organizational obstacles and problems of intercultural understanding. Nevertheless, the event has now achieved a kind of cult status and is mythologized as the breakthrough moment of EDM culture in South America. Drawing on German and Chilean sources, the article sheds light on the background and impact of the festival and discusses the important role of Chilean-German exiles as interpreters and cultural mediators within EDM scenes. This contribution questions the types of sources that festivals and similar events generate, and consequently asks how an international history of the event-based and present- and history-obsessed EDM culture could be written at all.