Author: Chris Moss
View album and artist detailsArtist/band: |
DJ Click |
Label: |
No Fridge |
Magazine Review Date: |
December/2020 |
The Mapuche are the sole surviving indigenous community in the Southern Cone. Settled mainly in the temperate Andean regions of Argentina and Chile, they are known for their fierce resistance to Spanish and Creole forces in the past, and to land-grabbing developers today. Their music, not well known in the Americas, is based around a wooden trumpet with an animal horn called a trutruca, a ceremonial drum and various flutes and bowed instruments. It responds to the wind, sea, nature and peaks with ethereal sounds and chants in the native Mapudungun tongue, but has none of the carnival energy of Peruvian and Bolivian ethnic music.
This collaboration with Frenchbased DJ Click ranges from percussionfree evocations of nature that fuse synths and traditional instruments – as on opener ‘Danza Mapuche (Spiritual Mix)’ and ‘Lonko Mew’ – to tracks combining teasingly gentle beats with the earthy tones of the Mapuche, generating something halfway between electro-jazz and ambient lounge (‘Wajkolxa’). On ‘Bio Bio’, named after a river that has played a central role in Mapuche wars and eco-campaigns, the tempo is upped a little and old-school keyboards create a chillout vibe. As for Colelo’s contribution, they are in fact an MoR pop-rock band who have had to pack away their guitars and soaring vocals to do this disc. While providing a worthy window on an unfamiliar culture, the release contains just six tracks and two remixes and the lighttouch interventions make it feel more like a work in progress than a fullyfledged exploration, musical tourism rather than on-the-road fieldwork.
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