'The host was a man who would tell stories about our history, and he would start every show by saying, 'Hello, my invisible friends. 'It was an amazing show, but we were 10 years old and didn't really care,' Pardo says. The band took its name from a kids' educational television show, 'Valores Humanos,' a program of Venezuelan history the members had to watch in school.

That's where we'd find them and buy them and play them over and over.' Lots of people started buying those records, and when things went bad in the late '80s and '90s, they all started turning up in used record stores. Radio DJs would fly to the States in the afternoon to buy the new records to play them that night on their shows. 'It was oil money, and it was making everyone feel rich. 'There was a lot of money in Venezuela back in the '70s,' Pardo explains. Their exploration of acid jazz led them backward into the '70s, and they began absorbing the records of Funkadelic Earth, Wind & Fire Kool & the Gang Chic Ohio Players George Benson and anyone else they could get their hands on. In Venezuela, Pardo and Figueredo joined forces with a school chum and friends of friends in 1991 from a nearby school, and soon they were playing live.

We can move from style to style - funk to soul to salsa to house to disco and back again - all in one song if we want to.

The band has a vibe that people respond to in a different way. 'DJs have been taking space from musicians for many years,' Pardo says. If anything can land them there it's the fact that they are a sublime live band, an organic force that can move a crowd in unique ways. Their remixes of Jamiroquai, Madonna and Michael Jackson (among dozens of others) have put them in the mainstream, somewhere Los Amigos Invisibles are eager to be. 1' and was produced by New York house pioneers Masters at Work, the duo of 'Little' Louie Vega and Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez, largely responsible for the 'Nuyorican soul' sound. The latest by Los Amigos Invisibles is 'The Venezuelan Zinga Son Vol. It's dance music, definitely inspired by the British scene of the early '90s, but their sound incorporates salsa and merengue, rock, hard funk and even the hottest electronica. Thirteen years later, they've definitely got their own thing happening, and it has made them international stars in the world of dance music, thanks to three releases on David Byrne's globally aware label Luaka Bop. Then we'd try to copy it, then turn it into our own thing.' 'It was hard to find out what was going on over there, but we would get copies of Melody Maker and read all about the acid jazz scene in the dance clubs there, and we'd have friends bring records back from England if they were traveling. 'One band that really sparked what we were doing was the Brand New Heavies,' says Armando Figueredo, the band's keyboard player. Pardo and his pals had been jamming, inspired by things they'd heard from across the Atlantic. 'And then in the dance clubs it was nothing but DJs. 'In Venezuela back then, there was a lot of heavy metal and goth bands playing in the clubs,' says Jose Luis Pardo, guitarist and primary songwriter in the band Los Amigos Invisibles. IN 1991, in a suburb of Caracas, Venezuela, called El Cafetal (named for the fact that it was once an enormous coffee plantation), three young school friends, all musicians, were complaining about the state of the music they were hearing.

Los amigos invisibles songs