Four chronicles about the city and ancestry
Belo Horizonte, San Pedro do Atacama, Valparaíso
- Egungun pasea por la “Serra”
- Viento
- Ritual y Deriva
- Las historias sobrepuestas de Valparaiso
This work utilizes a compositional procedure that employs field recordings, sound dérives and interaction with local musicians, participating in guided improvisations using both conventional and traditional South American instruments.
The project has its origins in an invitation made by the Centro de Estudios Musicales Latinoamericanos CEMLA, for an artistic residence in Chile. The project remit was to compose for the Ensamble Experimental Latinoamericano and has been financed by IBERMUSICAS, which thus made possible its execution.
These musical chronicles revolve around the relationship between South American cities and their people ancestors, who transit the city evident only by their mysterious sonority.
In the African Yoruba tradition, which is present in Brazilian culture, the spirit of the dead, which somehow returns to earth, is represented by the Egunguns. Their literal sonorous representation is manifest when two hollow bones are beaten against each other at random time intervals. It was precisely this sonority that I found in a field recording captured near to my house, in front of one of the largest favelas in Brazil, the Aglomerado da Serra.
I sent this first recording to the musicians at CEMLA so as to establish the musical approach central to the project.
The cities of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, San Pedro de Atacama and Valparaiso, Chile were chosen for these first musical chronicles. Together with this choice, the idea is that the metaphorical breath is something primordial and of common existence, emanating from the wind that blows across the whole continent.
Belo Horizonte is the capital of Minas Gerais, one of the Brazilian states that received the most African slaves throughout the colonial period and it was here that the politics of slavery led to the most suffering during the 18th and 19th century gold and diamond cycles. Today, many Afro-descendants live in the outskirts of the city, or in communities such as the Aglomerado da Serra.
In the Atacama Desert, I listened and read stories about the pre-Columbian mummified bodies of the Chichorros and the political prisoners mummified by the Chilean military dictatorship.
The sound of salt cracking throughout the day gave me the sensation of a long funeral that added to a certain sense of desolation which was perhaps intensified by the desert ...
In Valparaiso, I traversed the city listening and recording. The port region and the street elevators caught my attention. The port that was once the main in all of South America, and the city in general, allow the extracts of their memories to be engraved on the different sites and buildings like layered overlaped. Whilst this, it is present the possibility of an earth tremor threatens to change history yet again. This is makes instability a constant.
The process of composition was only made possible thanks to the creative partnership with the musicians Andrés Rivera and Camilo Lillo Castillo, as well as the dedication manifest in Fabián Contreras’ musical production.
Marco Scarassatti - viola de cocho, tarkas and ocarinas
Ensemble Experimental Latinoamericano
Andrés Rivera Fernández - electric guitar, tarkas, pifilkas and ocarinas
Camilo Lillo Castillo – electric bass, tromp, ocarinas
Mixed by Andrés Rivera Fernández
Mastered by Henrique Iwao
Artwork by Claudia Rivas
BR111
buhrecords.bandcamp.com
unautobus@gmail.com
Abril 2019 / Lima - Perú
released April 19, 2019
