Juyungo – Afro-Indigenous Music From The North-Western Andes

Expert compilation of Afro-Ecuadorian folklore presented in superior quality.

''Juyungo is a wonderful documentation of the unique Afro-Ecuadorian culture from the province of Esmeraldas which blends Afro-Indigenous traditions with rich musical heritage. Centred around the marimba, the music incorporates call-and-response chants, Andean guitar finger styles and the haunting sounds of panpipes to make for a deeply immersive experience. Tracks like 'Agua Largo' and 'Kasilla Shungulla' embody the spirit of cultural resistance, identity and healing and make for a brilliantly escapist listen.''

If you aren’t aware of Honest Jon’s you might be about to go down a bit of a wormhole. They’re one of London’s best record shops, based in Portobello Road no less, and have been going for fifty years. About twenty years ago they started a label releasing music ranging from lauded compilations unearthing Britain’s black music history, to bleeding edge house, folk, African music and the deeper side of dubstep when that was a thing. Dust off your credit card and don’t tell your partner.

Their latest compilation sees them heading over to Ecuador - perhaps not the first country you think of when considering South American music, let alone the Afro rooted sounds they’ve dug up. There’s no low hanging fruit either as they head to Esmeraldas, home of a unique Afro-Indigenous community, where they dig deep into some of the regions recorded musical heritage as well as even older field recordings. It’s a mind blowing collection of animistic roots and culture colliding fusion - raw, ritualistic and revelatory. -theslowmusicmovement.org

Since the 16th century, the Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas has been home to a unique Afro-Indigenous culture originating in the integration of the Indigenous Chachi and Nigua peoples with African Maroon communities. Juyungo documents significant Esmeraldan artists and bands playing the Afro-Ecuadorian folklore of the province, as well as including some older field recordings. Based mostly on the marimba, whose origins lie partly in the African balafon, partly in Indigenous percussion instruments, the music is laced with call and response chants, ambient insect and bird noise, the filigree finger-styles of the Andean guitar tradition and the panpipes of the mountains. This is resonant insider roots music at its headiest — the mystic revelation of Esmeraldas, gully deep and lustral.’ - Francis Gooding

The music is transfixing, magical; not like anything else. From start to finish, this album is continuously, profoundly immersive; a kind of journeying, trippy meditation about slavery and cultural resistance, identity and mix, places and spaces, futures and pasts. It’s inscrutable to net-surfing, algorithms, Shuffle. But for a taste try the insurgent marimba roller Agua Largo, jet-propelled by Rosa Huila’s rapturous blend of African spiritualist and Christian chant. ‘Healing music,’ Zakia called it on Gilles Peterson’s BBC show recently. And the ravishing pasillo Kasilla Shungulla — ‘calm your heart’ in the Quichua language — a duet between the Peruvian master-guitarist Raúl García Zárate and viola da gamba by Juan Luis Restrepo from Medellin, recorded in a baroque church in Buzbanza, Colombia.

 

Boomkat Product Review:

Honest Jon’s head deep into the Afro-Indigenous cultures of Ecuador’s NW Andes region to reveal the spellbinding musical cultures derived from generations of integration between Chachi & Nigua people and the African Maroons who escaped Spanish slavers from the C.16th onwards - a distinct blend of rhythmelodic vernaculars and hybrid folklores, lushly open to the sounds of insects and bird noise. Gorgeous, entrancing stuff

The 5th in HJ’s intrepid guided tours of Ecuadorian musics rarely heard beyond the rugged Andean mountain range and its extensive coastlines may be loosely recognisable for its central use of the marimba, ancestor of the African balafon. But it is also enchantingly unusual in the way it syncretises fingerpicked guitar lilt and call-and-response vocals about cultural resistance and panpipes from the mountains and continues to unfold along myriad, richly expressive lines that beguile on their entwining of the roughly familiar and utterly dreamlike.

To ears far removed from the region of Ecuador,, it surely piques ears intrigued by their prior volumes, and possibly recalls aspects of Mica Levi’s soundtrack to ‘Monos’ or even the otherworldly polyphonic chanting of ‘The Music of the Ba-Benzélé Pygmies’ known from ethnomusicological recordings popularised by Brian Eno & David Byrne and heard in Francis Bebey bits, but then they’ll throw in the likes of Juan Luis Restrepo’s heart-soaring, baroque folk piece ‘A Saravino’ or ravishing guitar and viola da gamba duet ‘Kasilla Shungulla (‘calm your heart’ in Quichua tongue) and preconceptions are regularly flipped.

If, like some (hands up here), you’re averse to mozzie bites and can’t afford the return ticket to the other side of the world, this set is the closest you may come to the magick of these musics. It is in abundance from the sort of rhythmelodic intricacies enlivened with the sounds of the space and cadence of ‘Agua Larga’ and ‘Bambuco La Katanga’, which share certain roots with the interests explored in Lechuga Zafiro’s techngnostic, anthropomorphic sound designs as much as Eno & Byrne.

It’s hard not to be snagged on the warm spiritual breeze of ‘San Juanito Chachi’ and the hearty blast of Rosa Hulla’s Andarele’, or become immersed in the heightened atmospheres of a ‘Tren Con Ritmo De Caramba’ and ‘Caramba Con Ritmo De Tren’, which both share fascinations with Chris Watson’s ‘El Tren Fantasma’ as much as original blues musics, but plunged much farther south and west into the imagination, as far as the astonishing ‘Galapago’ piece of DMT breath hallucination.

Various – Juyungo - Afro-Indigenous Music From The North-Western Andes

Label: Honest Jon's Records – HJRLP89
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Compilation, Limited Edition
Visit: https://caife.bandcamp.com/
Country: UK
Released: Oct 30, 2024
Style: Andean Music, Field Recording
Source: Digital

1. Kofán - El Bejuco Umbilical 3:20
2. Ensamble Juyungo - Chimborazo 2:57
3. Llaquiclla - Agua Larga 6:31
4. Asunción Quiñonez - Bambuco La Katanga 6:40
5. Juan Luis Restrepo - A Saravino 3:45
6. Juan Cayambe - Negra Muele Caña 1:23
7. Rosa Huila - Andarele 4:41
8. Ensamble Juyungo - Amanece 1:42
9. Caynamanda Cunangaman - Candela y Ron 4:02
10. Llaquiclla - Ceremonia Matrimonial 3:13
11. Ensamble Juyungo - Patagoré 0:46
12. Papá Roncón - Sanjuanito Chachi 5:15
13. Ensamble Juyungo - Llacta Pura 3:01
14. Llaquiclla - Ritual Emberá 2:46
15. Osvaldo Lindberg Valencia - Torbellino 5:30
16. Raúl García Zárate - Kasilla Shungulla 2:26
17. Ensamble Juyungo - Tren Con Ritmo De Caramba 3:38
18. Ensamble Juyungo - Caramba Con Ritmo De Tren 3:43
19. Llaquiclla - El Viaje Del Yagé 2:46
20. Ensamble Juyungo - Toquesito 2:29
21. Llaquiclla - Galapago 1:29
22. Llaquiclla - Carambalante 4:14