Champaqui is very organic music, there’s always something chirping, twittering, sweating, slithering and stirring in the background, with a very human presence
The little Japanese label Panai has released just a handful of albums in its two-year existence, but its global reach is impressive. Artists utterly unfamiliar to this listener—Sami Abadi, Lamine Traoré, Mari Kalkun, the Itiberê Orquestra Fameílie, Morteza Mahjubi, and Wu Fei—trace their origins to all four corners of the world and their common denominator appears to be non-traditional, indigenous-inspired avant-folk music.
Champaqui by Alejandra Franov, a multi-instrumentalist who has worked with Juana Molina and scored film in his native Argentina, is perhaps their first ambient electronic release, a deep and dense work inspired by the sacred moutain of that name. Rich, depthful field recordings are plaited into hazy synthesizer. On the surface, it is not unreminiscent of a recent wave of music by artists like Dolphins into the Future, who have retexturized and recontextualized New Age music into an abstract, ecological, experimental slurry. “La Poblacíon” is a ringing raga rising straight out of the Amazonian jungle, cutting through humid air and colourful bird chatter. The slightly atonal wooden flute of “Colanchanga” blends with a miasma of synthetic and natural sounds to create the impression of a dignified ceremonial. The magnificent “Sierra de la Ventana” stretches and trembles and floats over barely imaginable vistas for over a quarter of an hour, gracefully understating its startling beauty.
It is a very organic music, there’s always something chirping, twittering, sweating, slithering and stirring in the background, with a very human presence—not the least as Franov’s breathing in on “Ascochinga” is as loud as the flute itself, a flute which splinters into a prismatic drone, further confuses the senses on “Bialet Masse” and makes the warble of wildlife and synthesizer on “La Herradura” fuse as one. Finally, the jungle din overtakes the romance of the drone on “Los Terrones” and reclaims the territory for good.
Champaqui is available on Panai. [Buy at Boomkat or Juno]
