Viaje Sideral

A member of the UK/Colombian Mestizo project, El León Pardo plays the kuisi and other ancient Colombian flutes, as well as trumpet – in a manner recalling the late electronic/minimalist composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell. This in itself suggests how Pardo seeks to fuse traditional and contemporary sounds on his second album, “inspired by humanity’s relationship with the stars”, whose title translates as ‘Space Voyage’. When this fusion works best, on intoxicating numbers like ‘Cuando El Rio Suena’ or the extraordinary title-track (with faint echoes of two of Pardo’s musical reference points, Kraftwerk and Terry Riley), you feel like some cosmic voyager bound for unchartered galaxies. Heavy, dubby echo on ‘La Perica’, ‘Urmah’ and even on ‘Invocación’, a piece played solo on ancestral Zenú flutes, reinforces this strange, other-worldly quality. ‘Cumbia Espacial’, as the title suggests, invokes the influence of psychedelia on Colombia’s Indigenous music of the 70s and 80s. Viaje Sideral is quite a trip.