Since 2001, I have been working with the sounds of pre-Columbian musical instruments called “silbadores” or whistling vessel jars. Around the years 2003-5, I worked with Carlos Mansilla, Milano Trejo, Dimitri Manga, and Roxana Nuñez, as part of the project “Waylla Kepa” at the National Museum of Archaeology in Lima, Perú, recording their collection of archaeological musical instruments, and focusing particularly on Silbadores. The compositions that have emerged from these experiences reveal my own speculations around the idea of a Pre-Hispanic music in the Andes, and reflect my views on the radical modernity that these ancient instruments seem to propose, and which contrast the Western primitivist attitudes towards “Andean music” found in the colonial encounter. Indeed, the production of these instruments stopped with the colonial occupation, making them a symbol of the many absences and violences produced by the colonial occupation. Devoid of pictorial representations or a living performance practice, these instruments are approached speculatively and experimentally. In this way, they exhibit many features that we attribute today to experimental practices, which I push to a technologically mediated extreme. These works reflect my changing views about music over these almost 20 years of work with electronic and computer media, but also a reflection on my own positional relationship to the many aspects of andean culture that have been literally and metaphorically buried in the colonial encounter.

Silbadores 1 (2001)

Silbadores 2 (2005)

Silbadores 3 (2007)

Silbadores 4 (2013-14)

Plató América (2019)