Guajirando

Mito and Comadre (both noms de guerre: ‘myth’ and ‘midwife’) hail from Venezuela, but moved to Bogotá, Colombia in the last decade. Combining a deep knowledge of their country’s traditional music and an intimate familiarity with modern production, they have produced an absorbing mosaic, reminding us that Venezuela is as much Amazon and savanna as Caribbean, with a complex cultural strata like layers of minerals formed over years by heat and pressure. Their approach is to create a continuous rhythmic core – often of coastal origin – and then circulate other sounds around it in a shifting haze of vocals, retro keyboard licks, basslines and samples. ‘Será Que Pica’ draws on African, Amazonian and syncretic musics, ‘Va a Ver’ nods to soca and the African musics that underlie it, while ‘Palo de Agua’ throws a glance at 1970s Miles Davis before emerging into uncharted territory with lurching drums and disjointed keyboards under an incantatory vocal. It’s remarkable that this smartly produced recording, so assured and inventive, is the duo’s debut. There should be many more.