TEJIENDO NUBES CONTRA LA MUERTE LP 2x12"

Description

Tejiendo Nubes Contra la Muerte brings together poet and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña with Colombian pianist and composer Ricardo Gallo and the trio Hombre de Barro, featuring Ernesto "Teto" Ocampo, Urián Sarmiento, and Juan Manuel Toro. The album is rooted in a shared concern for the care of life, water, and the environment, finding in Vicuña's poetry a meeting point between contemporary creation and ancestral knowledge. The music was created collectively and spontaneously during the recording session. Gallo plays piano and synthesizers, Ocampo guitar, flutes, and harmonica, and Toro cello and flutes, while Vicuña's voice moves between spoken word, chant, whisper, breath, and silence. The result is an open, intuitive work in which improvisation becomes a space for dialogue between different forms of knowledge and sensibility. Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and visual artist based in New York. In the mid-1960s, she developed the concept of "Precarious Art" to name what disappears. The album features a selection of poems from Cloud Net, a book that addresses climate change through a perspective connected to Indigenous knowledge and dates back to the late 1990s. For the past decade, Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo have collaborated on poetic and sonic explorations encompassing recordings, live performances, installations, sound works, and videos. Gallo, a composer and improviser based in New York, maintains close ties to Bogotá's vibrant music scene. The members of Hombre de Barro combine extensive musical careers with research into Colombia's diverse musical traditions. Ocampo developed a profound body of research into Indigenous music; Sarmiento documents and records rural musical traditions through his label Sonidos Enraizados; and Toro has researched the music of the Inga people and other communities in southern Colombia. The album was recorded in La Calera, in the mountains outside Bogotá, in July 2022. A little over a year later, Teto Ocampo passed away; the album is dedicated to his memory. The session was supported by producer Julián Gallo and later mixed and mastered by Marc Urselli in New York. The cover features a work by Vicuña originally created for the Cloud Net exhibition, with the complete design by Raúl Zea. The LP includes an insert containing the poems performed on the album, in both Spanish and English translation.