“Son en la noche”
“During the day, an enormous tipee was built with poles and a large canvas. At night, it became a Teocalli, or house of the energies. In the centre, shines iztacuahutli, the eagle of fire. It is a solar symbol. The embers of the fire kept all night form the bird. Around it, women, children and men sing, pray, perform precise rituals and, helped by the medicine-deer, lead by the guide, enter the strong world of the sacred. It is only when it shines reddened at the centre of the earth that it is possible to see the sun directly. I went in with them… and a sound recorder.
Exactly 50 years ago, in 1957, a historical L.P. was published, recorded by the Etnomicologist R. Gordon Watson, in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, México. Thus were heard, outside their ritual context, the chants and prayers of Maria Sabina, a Mazatec shaman who cured with psiloscibe fungus.
Two years ago, I had the opportunity to record an evening of the Native American Church, at the mountainside of the Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl volcanoes, also in México. Their ceremonies are accompanied by the intake of peyote, or “medicine”. It is very rare that they allow audio or visual registries of that; nevertheless, the Navajo priest Kruber did allow it. Days later, before his return to Arizona, I had the chance to record his chanting at my studio.
These are exclusively the sources being used in my project, editing and processing selected pieces of the original audios through different procedures of radio art, specially: the simultaneous trebling of tracks with different processing at DJ equipment, building of loops and unaltered segments. All of it, mounted on a digital console table.
I search for a reconstruction of that experience, and to express, with the sound movement, the dynamic polarities of the thinking and cosmic vision of the original inhabitants of America, who co-exist today with the modern world. The elements and forces of nature, life and death, the four cardinal directions, the complementary tension between opposites, are key concepts in their existence, and of this radio work. The psiloscibe fungus are linked to water and femininity, and peyote, the solar cactus, is linked to masculinity. The natural and the artificial, the archaic and the contemporary, nostalgia and hope, interiority and exteriority, vinyl and digital processing, are put into play around the crepitating of fire and the scratch of the needle on the vinyl record. Aiming at the meaning of Pólemos, in Heraclitus, or the Ying and Yang of taoism, Atl talchinolli is a concept that in Nahuatl language means burnt water, a symbol of the confrontation that perhaps shows best the spirit of this work.
Key to the aesthetics of this project is also the omnipresence of the technological artifice that interferes with and alters the ritual, both in the actual events of the two documented evenings, and in the recognition of the inmanence of the witness-recreator. The magical world, the voices and the sacred fire are there, they can be heard, but between echoes, delays, distortions, transpositions and interfering of emblematically digital sounds. The natural and external sound registrar, coexisting with its reflections on an inner prism. This is the pertinent meaning to speak of an altered perceptive state.“
(Emiliano López Rascón, sound and radio artist)
Recorded in September 2007.
Awarded work on the XIV Radio Art Contest organized and coproduced by Radio Clasica and the CDMC (Center for Diffusion of Contemporary Music, Spanish Ministry of Culture).
Realized at LIEM-CDMC Studios.
First audition: 2007 Alicante Festival
First broadcasting: Ars Sonora (RNE Radio Clasica) 07.10.2007
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