Point anywhere on a globe, and your finger will land somewhere that offers the rest of the world something unique. That might be a geographic feature, some historic site or something of cultural significance. No matter how many times to point somewhere new, the vast richness and astounding variety of our planet becomes quickly apparent.
When thinking like this within the context of music, it’s easy to see that for most places, the development of both musical instruments, and the raw impetus to make music shaped by that place. In the context of OBLADADA’s own Scottish background, it seems obvious our variant of bagpipes (Great Highland Bagpipes) was somehow to compete with the howling gales and vast empty glens. Music demands in Scotland had to be big and bold, to stand any chance of being heard. It also had to be made from materials easy to hand. Our bagpipes have been used since the 1400’s and feature in gatherings as well as army and battle situations, presumably in part due to its powerful droning sound. A way to convey identity, strength, power and even fear – a sound made to fit a particular geographical and human function.
So, every country, landscape and culture, has its own requirements, and a history told through its music, and means of music making.
In the case of Bolivian composer Cergio Prudencio -his approach broadly draws on his own country’s deep and engrossing musical heritage. The instruments gathered for Antología 1: Obras para la Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos reads like nothing less than a feast for the imagination. We are treated to the particular sonorities of Mohoceño, Teponaztle, Flamboyant seeds, Pinkillus, Sikus, Water drum, Jacaranda seeds, Wankara, Tarka, Caja chapaca, Udu, Sikuriada, Pinkilli koiko, Tropa, Pífano, Italaki, Ch’iñisku and Phututu. Everything here is new to our eyes and ears…
Prudencio is a passionate expert on these Bolivian instruments, and co-founded Orquestra Experimental de Insrtumentos Nativos (OEIN) in 1980. This ensemble work with traditional instruments from the Andean highlands and aim to create both avant garde compositions alongside ancient traditional music from Aymara and Quechua communities in Bolivia. This album is a collection of their passionate live performances, all captured in the country’s capital city – La Paz.
Knowing nothing about the composer, or any of the context or instruments used, the simplest thing to do was to hit the play button. Little did we know, 84 minutes later, we’d be obsessed.
5 works that are collected here were composed between 1980 and 2015, and everything feels like a beautiful illustration of the sounds that these odd instruments make, gathering and organised into droning patterned high altitude ecstasies.
The opener Cantos Insurgentes (insurgent chants), spends its entire duration as a tumbling introduction to all sorts of unusual sounds. Episodic blocks that gather into a space somewhere between field recording and composition. The brief Triptica dances around repeating patterns, silence and tiny droplets of beauty and twinkling notes.
The 5 parts of Otra Ciudude (another city) map out yet more settings for Prudencio’s sonic characteristic. A droning, ever mutating stream of reeds, whistles, all interlocking, dipping and diving around each other. A major sense of unfamiliarity rendered initial listens as it drifts through completely unusual and new sounds.
Devoid of any immediate reference points, but over time, a sense that this music is channelling Edgard Varese through some ancient hight altitude ceremony, forms in our mind. This creative joining of dots in the ether, cements in the penultimate piece, La Cuidad (the city) that builds over 23 minutes. This piece, from 1980, is the oldest collected here but shows his intentions most clearly as shuddering fragments slowly transforming into a huge banging and thudding procession approaching wherever you happen to be. Eventually the whole thing trails off into ghostly smudges and dreamlike horizons.
The whole album is a succession of unfamiliar treasures, slowly re-tuning your brain, but the closer is no less than a searing masterpiece.
Giving the false impression that things might end up shrouded in ominous, Cantos Funerales (funeral chants) fills the final 22 minutes of this collection. After seven minutes of slow alignment, thundering monolithic drums burst in. It can’t be played loud enough. It’s easy to think you’re suddenly listening to Faust, Boredoms or a Sister Ray demo, the effect is spine tingling. Music, exuding its very live atmosphere, superbly primitive, boiled down into its simplest gestures. Slowly and exactingly over each drumbeat, other sounds overlap, like different textures painted over each thud. A universe of colour extracted from something acoustic and ancient. A vision of somewhere, another realm, from something fundamental. Eventually things spill over into a percussive cacophonous wave of bliss. Things then settle into more contemplative forms, but everything feels so much more passionate, colourful, and energised than the grey downbeat nature of funerals elsewhere. The whole celebration of life notion has never felt so true.
When the album finally trails off into silence, it’s clear everything here has some sort of meaning. The back story of these instruments, the material used and how they fit into life, in both ancient and modern Bolivia, is still beyond our grasp. We’ve listened countless times during a rainy and stormy Scottish winter with the vaguest of any real understanding of much we’ve heard. But in a way, this means the sound alone communicates with an intoxicating and very genuine power. Built from a sweet spot that sits somewhere between drone and simple but superbly heady fissures of rhythm.
Antología 1: Obras para la Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos is a highly recommended mixture of sonic documentation, preservation, and a singular approach to composition.
A superbly warm welcome into a completely new world.
Antología 1: Obras para la Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos is out on Buh Records on 23 February. Available to preorder here, both digitally and as a limited edition double vinyl set.
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