Kamana

Now here's an odd one. Carlos Casas is a Spanish-born filmmaker and artist whose work encompasses film, sound and visual arts. His previous projects have included a documentary about favelas in Rio de Janeiro, and field recordings made in remote regions of Siberia, Tajikistan, Patagonia and Indonesia. Kamana takes him to the Zambales region of Luzon island in the Philippines, and the nomadic, hunter-gatherer culture of the indigenous Aeta people there. Having lived with them for weeks, Casas was impressed by the Aeta's endurance and survival skills, subsisting on basic agriculture while hunting wild pigs and bats.

This release is a series of ethnological field recordings and electronic manipulations, ‘inspired by and channelling the culture and traditions of the Aeta,’ which also bills itself as, ‘a sonic exorcism filled with ancestral frequencies, haunted ghosts, and other animistic spirits from the Pinatubo forests.’ Be that as it may, as a listening experience it's an occasionally interesting, but not altogether enthralling, non-melodic ambient soundscape, with snatches of unknown minimalist instruments – some percussive, some perhaps blown or bowed, it's rather hard to say – augmented by infrequent animal noises, disembodied voices and village sounds. An accompanying video would have been helpful to fully understand this conceptual album.