Pacha Wakay Munan

El tiempo quiere cantar

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT, FOLK / ROOTS

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Peruvian researchers and musicians Dimitri Manga Chávez and Ricardo López Alcas comb pre-Hispanic Andean history on 'El tiempo quiere cantar', reclaiming ancient instruments (whistles, flutes and conch trumpets) and stretching their capabilities, bringing the beguiling sounds into forward-facing compositions. So, so good - essential listening if you're into Debit's 'The Long Count' or Lukas De Clerck's 'The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas'.

Luis Alvarado's towering Buh imprint has done it again here: Pacha Wakay Munan's debut is a rare and beautiful thing, a record that's as impeccably researched and conceptualized as it is recorded and arranged. Chávez and Alcas are both well-established figures on the Peruvian scene, Alcas is a musicologist at Lima's Universidad Nacional de Música, while Chávez describes himself as a cultural researcher; they conceptualized Pacha Wakay Munan as a multi-disciplinary collective over a decade ago to trace the origins of ancient American music, and began to figure out how these soundscapes and principles might be relevant in a contemporary context. So, using pre-Columbian aerophonic, membraphonic and idiophonic instruments such as chimú (whistling jars that make a bird-like chirping sound), antara nasca (high pitched clay pan pipes), and pututos (ceremonial trumpets made from seashells), Pacha Wakay Munan blur the line between ancient music and the downstream folk traditions it inspired, viewing hundreds of years of Peruvian culture and evolution in fresh light.

They're quick to say that they're not attempting to "reconstruct a lost sound", but to examine how these excavated instruments could add to new music. So on opener 'Pacha Wakay Munanqa', Alcas and Chávez offset their breathy improvisations with fractal synthwork, drawing parallels between the fictile flute sounds and rubbery kosmische squelches and pads. Rarely staying static for a moment, the album shifts sideways on 'El Taki Onkoy', combining reverberating chants with rickety rhythms that bring movement to the oddly-tuned, buzzing drones; this one sounds like a ceremonial march of some kind, with the pututos and the blood-curdling screams coagulating into a de facto fanfare. And the duo consider their arsenal of instruments as a jazz ensemble on 'Mundo Posible', playing syncopated folk percussion - on shakers and boxes - and ceramic pipes to accompany a central piano performance from musicologist Chalena Vásquez Rodríguez. It's as if Chávez and Alcas are teasing us with possibilities, and coaxing us to wonder what contemporary music might sound like if it had access to these "lost" sonorities.

The stand-out is 'Agua, Cuarzo y Viento', a provocative beatless piece made from quartz skulls and singing bowls that are struck like gongs and stabilized with outlying whistles and woody ASMR scrapes. Deep, evocative and meditational, it's music that's completely out of time, neither old or new.

MP3 Release (8)