Beautifully printed & pressed ltd vinyl edition of 1000.
Side A – Dyscalculia / Echolocation / Interwhining
Side B – Diablada / The Stumble / Babel-17
Includes unlimited streaming of Echolocation
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 5 days
Purchasable with gift card
$24USDor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Gorgeous set printed on heavyweight stock, with additional artwork & notes by Ava Mendoza & Devin Hoff on the inner panels.
Includes unlimited streaming of Echolocation
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 5 days
Purchasable with gift card
$14USDor more
lyrics
The title comes from a folk dance that happens at Bolivian carnival every year... performers dressed as devils dance and act out a fight.
In Andean culture, the devil is often celebrated/honored, and isn’t considered to be simply “evil” in the traditional Christian sense. Thru religious syncretism, the Christian devil mixed with several Andean— Inca and pre-Inca— deities. Anchancha (Aymara), Muki (Quechua), and Tiw (Uru) are a few of these. All of them have to do with the underworld, and literally with being inside the earth. Because of this, they rule the mines and mining towns, which were/are a huge part of Bolivia. El Tio is the modern-day deity of the mines, and he combines aspects of the devil and the other deities just mentioned.
The Diablada comes from the mining regions of the country—Oruro and around northern Potosi. My great-grandma came from a mining family in this area, and the folklore has always felt close to home.
The tune is the spirit of the dancing, playing, fighting devils/spirits with underground superpowers, filtered thru my Ornette Coleman/Ronald Shannon Jackson Decoding Society type lens. I should note that there is traditional music that goes along with the Diablada, but the tune doesn’t really reference it.
We play the head once with sax + guit unison on the melody. The 2nd time, I play the melody and James improvises at the same time. I wouldn’t call it a solo necessarily, but he creates an improvised counterpoint to the head. Both the head melody and my guit solo start modally, and then veer off from there into a more harmolodic approach.
Additional References: Betty Davis, Mulatu Astatke
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