Music for Shape-Shifters: Field Recordings from the Amazonian Lowlands, 1981-1985

Cat No: SF125LP Label: Sublime Frequencies Genre: FOLK / ROOTS, DOCUMENTARY

Wakuénai (Curripaco)

Music for Shape-Shifters: Field Recordings from the Amazonian Lowlands, 1981-1985

Genre: FOLK / ROOTS, DOCUMENTARY

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

Sublime Frequencies are on their A* game with these mesmerising tape recordings made by Wakuénai villagers upriver in early ‘80s Venezuela, documenting all night ceremonial sessions, anthropomorphic flute calls, and voyages on the Upper Río Negro ...

‘Music for Shape - Shifters 1981 - 1985’ firmly marks Sublime Frequencies' return to their core interests in field recording and ethnomusicology after excursions into modernity via Egyptian band The Handover earlier in ’24. A seven-part suite spanning guttural wind expressions to transmutations of jungle spirits and animals, via bawdy wisecracks and culminating the 15 mnutes of ‘Ten men playing in the village plaza’, it presents label boss Hisham Mayet’s edits of a project conceived by late anthropologist Jonathan Hill (1954-2023), and becomes a memorable epitaph to his legacy of studies in the Amazonian lowlands.

The first two pieces of catfish trumpets and ceremonial flutes were recorded by Hill in situ at Gavilán, Río Guainía, Venezuela, October 24, 1981, and are fascinating for their documentation of the instruments’ deeply unusual low end tones and deliciously groggy melodies. However the album really comes into its own with the proceeding bulk of the recordings, as made by the villagers themselves at a remote site along the Tomo River, Colombia, 1985, after Hill would leave his equipment in the village, returning nearly a year later to discover the head villager and his sons had captured some 12 hours of sounds spanning a range of ensembles, sacred chants, spirit languages, and performances channelling the voices of the fauna they co-exist with, in the jungle, on the river.

Between the whoops and throaty rumbles of ‘Men playing trumpets in canoe’ and the aforementioned 15’ gathering, we hear from the villagers perspective, resulting the extraordinary piece of anthropomorphic mimicry in ‘Place-naming Pt.2’, and sozzled scenes of ‘Yaraki Rum, Songs, and Sexual Jokes’ with pitching flutes giving way to wisecracks and fits of joyous giggles, and a simply otherworldly part of woos and low end harmonics in ‘The sound that opened the world’ that distantly reminds, to our far removed ears, aspects of Mica Levi’s haunting score to ‘Monos’.

LP (Black Vinyl) (7)