Mestizo Music: a Political Topography of Diachronic Times. Inscribing my mestiza aural experience of Yangana and Prender el Alma

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Mestizo Music: a Political Topography of Diachronic Times

Inscribing my mestiza aural experience of Yangana and Prender el Alma

Isadora Gabriela Ponce Berrú

Thesis rMA Cultural Analysis Faculty of Humanities Supervisor: Dr. Joost de Blois Second reader: Dr. Barbara Titus

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“El sur como una insurrección de sabidurías subyugadas…como historia, como el hallazgo de nuevos paradigmas políticos…como conversaciones entre civilizaciones, el sur como nuevos universalismos, nuevas interpretaciones, nuevos significados, nuevos imaginarios, nuevos amarres…”

Corinne Kumar

Although this thesis does not respond to a linear argument and its components are interrelated, my encounter with what I will call mestizo Ecuadorian music – the object of inquiry – has a chronological history. The first time I listened to it was in 2012, inside a small concert hall where “Mancero Trio” was performing their new album Yangana. During the hour-long concert, I felt that performance and performativity became one for those musicians and I was caught in the materiality of the sounds; my fragmented mestiza subjectivity was loudly resonating in the music, this time, without any hierarchies and power relations among its voices. Somehow I was confounded by them. I felt they were screaming to be heard and I surrendered to them in a way I cannot explain. My vulnerability emerged with theirs and my sense of self felt changed. I was undone by the music. Yangana traversed the independent space of the small and obscure hall to filter into other social institutions of my body. Its affective power acted upon me in various forms: making me move, dance, remember and dislocate from my „here and now‟ to another space where my cultural memory felt simultaneously uncanny and familiar. I projected myself in all those voices, places, and temporalities rendered by the music and, oddly enough, I was repaired by them. As a re-existing gift, my past was brought into my becoming in the present, and I experienced my body in its individual, collective, and political dimension.

Yangana (Mancero) is an album composed by Daniel Mancero for a trio format: piano,

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codes: indigenous, Euro-American genic1, mestizo. For the composer, his work is framed as

postcolonial music due to its political purpose. Yangana‟s aim was to rethink the understanding of Ecuadorian music closing the gap between the popular and the academic, and the traditional and the contemporary to discover the music from its reality (Editorial, “Yangana es un andino cosmopolitaˮ).

Since that night, Yangana produced a crack in my collective mestizo subjectivity. Mestizo is the product of crossbreeding between races and cultures emerged with the conquest of Latin America. Paraphrasing Gloria Alzandúa, it is a coming together of two or more self-consistent but habitual incompatible frames of reference, causing conflict, cultural collision, and a state of perpetual transition (100). It is a condition of inhabiting and moving between multiple cultures, internal voices, and languages making the mestizo reside “in the borderlands”, while inhabiting contradiction and ambiguity (Polar 1994), which for some Latin American scholars occurs despite the pain of turning the ambivalence into something else (Alzandúa 100–03; Echeverria 1998). Therefore, mestizo and mestizaje go beyond an identity discussion to reach a particular form of culture and being of a Latin American region (Alzandúa 2007; Echeverria 1998).

In this regard, the main stream of mestizo – “ that under goes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war”(Alzandúa 100) marked by colonial relations of power that locates it in a dilemma of which collectivity should be heard – was questioned by the music (Roitman and Oviedo 2016; Silva 2004; Sierra 2002). By bringing different cultural codes using particular techniques, the traditional and popular music and the western form of the contemporary jazz cohabited together, re-constructing themselves in the musical space without “whitening” the sounds. For the first time, I could experience my local traditions and my cultural memory trough sounds within the art-academic realm. Art stopped being an individual activity to reach its collective dimension and enunciation.

My unexpected first encounter with Yangana and the effects-affects produced could be framed under Gille Deleuze‟s understanding of encounter (Difference and Repetition 176). An object of encounter is perceived by our senses and gives rise to sensibility. It is a being of the sensible by which our usual way of being is challenged and our systems of knowledge disrupted

1

I refer to harmonies, rhythms, structures that are original from these areas or have been associated as part of the “Western-Modern culture.”

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(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 176; O‟Sullivan 1). For Simon O„Sullivan, within art encounters: “We are forced to thought. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivity […] The rupturing encountering also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently” (O‟Sullivan 1).

Two years ago, I came across with Nicola Cruz‟ album: Prender el Alma (Cruz), whose diverse sounds took me into a journey of sounds and rhythms producing similar sensations than

Yangana. I heard the place I come from sounding in its voices, places, and temporalities all of

them in the same space. Despite Cruz‟s music belonging to the genre of electronic, the introduction of indigenous, afro, and traditional elements in it alters the experience of electronic music. The ritual occupied the technological sphere to revert its instrumentalized use to give us the possibility of listening to nature‟s voices that are part of the place we inhabit, our culture, and ourselves.

Cruz‟ composition crystalized in what Mancero had already prompted: the possibility of thinking our relation with the world and ourselves through the sonorous, allowing connections that differ from the hegemonic ones, as I will expose throughout this thesis. My listening to both, ever since, has become an endless process where the music unfolds over time. Although my memory can sketch what sounds come next, their materiality continues producing diverse affordances, where I, as in the first time, rethink my subjectivity, my cultural memory, my space and temporality with and through the music.

Both type of music disclose a similar process of creation, in which the territory‟s anchor comes from the composers‟ inner experience marked by their relation to Ecuador‟s sounding geography. This is to say, a certain distribution of sounds that gives an account of diverse landscapes, relations, of a culture are characterized by a peculiar sonorous space. This particular form of listening enclosed in the two albums is replicated in the last two years in Ecuador‟s musical scene, where a new musical language within the mestizo urban middle class is emerging significantly. This new sonic language, lacking conceptual framing to define it, has in common

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with the incorporation of traditional2 and popular sounds to other music genres a claim for belonging to a place and exploring what we are3.

Although this „hybridization phenomena‟ could respond to effects of globalization and the growth of the fetichization of the ethnic otherness in the West (Sanjay 411), there is a similar acoustic practice operating in the music, this is to say, a specific form of listening and understanding sound that shed lights on a comprehension of the world based on a different form of producing and transmitting knowledge. Can we re-think our relation with the world through the acoustic? And if it is so, what are the edges embedded in this music, from which the mestizo is fraught in her understanding of the world and herself? What are the politics of those sounds?

Through my musicking – understanding this as any acts involved in musical performance: whether listening, composing, performing, dancing to broadcasting and analyzing the music (Small 9) of Yangana and Prender el Alma – in this thesis, I will explore how sounds operate as a modality of knowing and being in the world (Feld, “Acoustemology” 2015; Ochoa Gautier,

Aurality 2014), in which the music simultaneously reflects and constructs the mestizo aural

experience from which a particular subjectivity could emerge. Presenting the aural as the preponderant sense locates sounds as the substance of the world, a force that constitutes it, and a medium from which people frame their knowledge about it (Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 3; Novak and Sakakeeny 2015; Feld, “Acoustemology” 2015). To build my argument of the relation between music and knowledge, I will turn to Steven Feld‟s account of acoustemology, which discloses a relational-ecological understanding of sounds. In my thesis, I will parallel Feld‟s approach with the Deleuzoguattarian notion of assemblages, as open ended gatherings, that align and complement with acoustemology to explain how music constitutes and operates. However, my understanding of both of these conceptual frames will be performed under a decolonial reading due to the geographical location of my object and my self.

According to Feld, “Acoustemology” is the combination of “acoustics” and “epistemology” to theorize sound as a way of knowing” (“Acoustemology” 12). It focuses on

2

I understand the term tradition as a trait of cultures (indigenous or not) that comes from a non-capitalist modes of production and it is inherited from a shared memory or constructed history (Mullo 14).

3

To see some of the emergent bands watch: “Sonido Mestizo: The Nu LatAm Sound Ecuador” YouTube, uploaded by ZZK Films, 28 Feb.2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ZaOF5Gl6s&t=4s. Access 1 March 2018.

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how sounds are “present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations”, in which the outcome (sounding) is simultaneously social and material, “an experimental nexus of sonic sensation” (12) that departs from a relational ontology for which existential relationality is built on the between-ness of experience (12). By focusing in the encounter between sound, subject, environment, and social context, acoustemology searches the “mutual” and “ecological” space of sonic knowing as situational, contingent, polyphonic, dialogical, and unfinished. It is here where particular histories of sounding and listening emerge (12,13).

This ecological intersection of acoustic knowledge resembles Felix Guattari‟s three ecologies: social relation, human subjectivity, and environment that coexist in an ethico-political articulation or what he calls „ecosophy‟ (Guattari 28). Each ecology has its own logic, operates individually at the same time that interact transversally like ecosystems, from which entities are formed (43). Music will be formed in the interrelations of those, resembling a Deleuzoguattarian notion of assemblage as aggregated parts constituted by diverse relations within „ecosophy‟. Assemblages are open-ended gatherings that pose two sides: the organization of bodies and their potential (Turestsky 15). Like assemblages, the music departs from and is formed through a particular territory, holding the content and expression of it: they are the territory‟s enunciation and practice, as the first section of the thesis will analyze (Deleuze et al. 8,9). Simultaneously, they interact with external territories/assemblages de-territorializing themselves and decoding their elements, from which new configurations and inexistent relations could emerge. Paraphrasing the authors, there is a tetravalence in the assemblage: content and expression, and territoriality and de-territorialization (9,10). By taking into account Deleuzoguattarian assemblages in combination of acoustemology, I will understand music as a polyphonic assemblage that is formed within the three ecologies, functioning as a form of subjectification, in which a process of singularization -construction of individuals- take place.

Both conceptual approaches converge in an ecological and relational perspective without addressing relations of power and knowledge. Acoustemology does not account for how power and knowledge relations percolate the encounter of sonic sensations, nor do Deleuzoguattarian assemblages, whose purpose is the opposite: to find forms to evade power. However, relations of power and knowledge are inscribed in any phenomena, even more in the inquired object that comes from a postcolonial country. Therefore, it is necessary to question how those elements problematize and ravel the construction of knowledge with and through the acoustics? How do

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they affect the encounter, and therefore, the production of knowledge? How do power and knowledge relations influence the capability or incapability to translate what is perceived into the linguistic realm? If music is an epistemic “thing” that crystalizes how people know the world (Feld, “Acoustemology”; Ochoa Gautier, Aurality), what are the filiations involved and produced by it? How does music construct sentiments and sensibilities displayed in the subject subjectivity, constructing and reshaping it?

In her book “Aurality,” Ana Maria Ochoa addresses an aural understanding of the world that aligns with acoustemology besides situating the discussion in Latin American context and remarking the relations of power and knowledge. For Ochoa, modes of aural experience are directly linked to modes of listening that have been historically inscribed on different surfaces and are present in the schemes through which we construct knowledge: linguistically, visually, and/or aurally (Aurality 1–7). Following Lisa Gitelman, Ochoa understands inscription as “the act of recording a listening into a particular technology of dissemination and transmission” (7) that involves "legible representations of aural experience" (7). This, in turn, recognizes the multiplicity of legible technologies used throughout history that have made possible the circulation of sounds, of which music has itself been one.

In this regard, the valid aural expressive forms as the outcome of the relations among ear and sound are part of the sensible fabric of experiences, resonating in Rancièrean distribution of

the sensible4, from which ideas, perceptions, affects, and forms of listening-interpretations will

be established (Rancière IX). Indeed, there is a distribution of the sonic within music, which in the case of Latin America involves not only class-power relations established by the structure of Capitalist Modernity, as Rancière lucidly analyses, but also due to colonial relations of power (Quijano 2007). Having partition and differentiation as two of its constituve principles, Western Capitalist Modernity‟ displaces bodies according to both: class and geography. This determines bodies‟ position in the world system and legitimatizes whose voices or sounds are more loudly, who has the right to speak and sound, and under which forms and circumstances (De Sousa Santos 2016; Walter D Mignolo 2010; Rancière 2013; Ochoa Gautier 2014). Therefore, due to Daniel Mancero and Nicola Cruz‟s spatial location, it is necessary to contemplate the

4_{It is the construction of the sensible order: “a set of relationships between the ways of being, thinking,} and dong which determine at once a common world and the way in which those subject take part” (Rancière, Modern Times 12).

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politics of knowing and sensing in order to be aware of how music anchors a politics of knowledge that is ingrained in their bodies and in the local histories from where the music emerged and is displayed.

Edgardo Lander sustains that Modernity established not only the world‟s colonial organization, but also the colonial constitution of knowledge, language, memories, and imaginaries where all cultures, populations, and territories were organized into a totality of a space and time. In a universal narrative this based itself on the „ethnicity‟ and „racial‟ supremacy of the white man (Lander 16). Instituting the white as the conquer of Latin America and what Aníbal Quijano has called the colonial matrix of power; a political, economic, social, and cultural domination system that articulates itself through the global market (Capitalism as its system) and the idea of race, producing social discrimination (Quijano 168). Coloniality was grounded as the zero point of observation, where modernity/rationality positioned itself as the only and universal epistemology, hiding its geo-historical body location (Mignolo, Darker Side

of Modernity 80). In the cultural realm, it inferred cultural repression, colonization, and

extermination of the local narratives and cultures, in addition to imposing a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge that still having devastating repercussions in postcolonial nations (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2014). For decolonial scholars, within a Gramscian notion of culture, European culture was and still works as an instrument of power to legitimize the perception of the world under a Western epistemology and Modernity as a hegemonic symbolical order (Quijano 168; Mignolo 2014). Art‟s paradigmatic basis in European art discourses has established the valid sensing and knowing to participate in the sensible sphere (Vazquez and Contreras 79). Within this sphere, music has contributed to the creation of a sonorous space marked by colonial relations of power, acting as a subjectification devise to reinforce the Modern/Colonial order (Estévez, “Sonoridades y Colonialidad Del Poder” 54; Holguín and Shifres 45). Notwithstanding this, the complexity of sound and its space cannot be reduced to the coloniality of sound, as the thesis will disclose. The sonorous space with its sounds and silences is a space of resistance and production of different politics of life that cannot be subsumed under Western Modernity and its episteme (Ochoa Gautier 2014; Estévez 2015; Periáñez 2018), from which Deleuzoguattarian account of assemblages will provide the tool to argument how from and with sounds there is an alter form of think and being.

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Returning to Ochoa‟s argument of modes of aural experiences, she argues for the existence of two audible expressions in the region that can be grouped in the audible techniques of lettered elite and the peoples historically considered "non-literate," acknowledging their complex fabric and their multiple connections between the linguistic and visual realm (Aurality 4). Expressions, I will argue along the chapters, still carve the mestizo sonic achieve‟ archetype from which we listen and sound becomes sounding. With this, I am referring to how from physics‟ acoustic understating of sound: as “a form of energy that travels in waves through a medium” (Brabec de Mori 25), the vibration is perceived and becomes known though its materiality as sound, voice, silence, noise, or music (Brabec de Mori 26; Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 75). Transformation that occurs in the encounter with the subject‟s auditory apparatus, whose socio-linguistic system and cosmology will vary according to the sound‟s affordances and understating (Clayton 7), as I will develop further. Hence, the process of sounding would depict multiple ecologies of the acoustic, in which the act of listening is essential to the “translation of sound” (Kapchan, “The Splash or Icarus” 2) and implies a "different understanding of the relation between sounds, music, people, and place”(Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 75).

Likewise Ochoa understands Colombia as a disputed site of different acoustic practices (Aurality 4). As such, I will understand both Yangana and Prender el Alma as a form of inscription –taken from Ochoa – comprising a contested and relational site that reflects and construct the mestizo aural experience. Although I will acknowledge and highlight how these legible representations are marked by a “highly unequal power in the constitution of the public sphere” (Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 6) by colonial relations of power, I am interested in exploring how these practices relate at the sonic level to produce in their encounter a new mestizo audible practice. A form of listening-sounding, in which the relation between the ear and the sound from which the music arises is fraught under a particular spatiotemporal configuration that will reflect a form of being in the world and construct knowledge about it through the medium of sound (Feld 2015; Ochoa Gautier 2014).

I will demonstrate how this audible practice exceeds colonial histories capable of problematizing unequal relations of power and reaching other surfaces acting in and through the body (Kapchan 2015). The aural experience prompted by the music‟s sonic sensation clashes with the linguistic realm – embedded in coloniality –, resisting conceptualization and activating a phenomenology, in which the senses cannot be divided. Therein, the body works as the center

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and collector of experience from which the world would be apprehended, and memories, cultural traditions, places, and voices are felt and transmitted it (Maya Restrepo 2005; Merleau-Ponty 2002; Taylor 2003; Viveiros de Castro 1998). Consequently, the musical language resonates with what many decolonial scholars have called decolonial aesthesis, understanding this as unveiling the geo-political location of knowledge and how it operates, while simultaneously opening up options for liberating the senses and affirming other modes of knowledge that have been marginalized or denied by imperial-colonial structures (Mignolo, “Decolonial Aesthetcis Manifesto”).

By locating myself in the research: my musicking of the albums, I will select three pieces of music: Neblina de Guápulo5 from Mancero‟s album Yangana, and Sanación6 and Prender el

Alma from Cruz‟s album Prender el Alma7 to perform a close listening-reading of the pieces8. The musicking will include brief statements of the composers and my personal affective responses in the encounter, performing an integral reading of the object where the visual (in the case of Prender el Alma), discursive, and sonic will not be separated in the analysis.

Within this approach the division between researcher (me) as the subject and the music as an object of research study becomes blurred. Interpreting sounds, or what acoustemology refers to as the transformation of sound into sounding – social and material – will occur only in the encounter with the body in a specific time and place, wherefrom meaning and knowledge can be produced through participation and reflection (“Acoustemology” 13,14). Subsequently, the analysis of the music is also my personal inscription of the sounds. Consonantly, musicking implies a process-based understanding of the music instead of dealing it objectually, convoluting Cultural Analysis‟s methodology and requiring the combination of close reading with another methodology more suitable for the music‟s analysis.

5_{Listening to: Mancero, Daniel. “Neblina de Guápulo,” Yangana. Quito, 2011,}

https://mancero.bandcamp.com/album/yangana. 6

Listening to: Cruz, Nicola. “Sanación,” Prender el Alma. ZZK Records, Quito, 2015,

https://soundcloud.com/nicolacruz/sets/prender-el-alma. 7

See: Cruz, Nicola. “Prender el Alma” Prender el Alma. YouTube, uploaded by ZZK Records, 2016,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnXMe7RPfgw. Access 10 February 2018 8

Although the focus will be on the selected tracks, I will be referring to their albums as part of their larger narrative, likewise a book or film analysis.

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Sound writing coined by Debora Kapchan and many other music scholars, is a

speculative approach to theorize sound leading towards a phenomenological-affect perspective. According to them, music produces sound knowledge, this is to say “a non Deleuzoguattarian discursive form of affective transition resulting from acts of listening” (“The Splash or Icarus” 2). In this way, sound writing will be the performance in word-sound of such knowledge (2). Under this approach, listening and the body are the hubs for theorizing sound, placing a speculative inquiry into the method/theory in order to write sound (2). Therefore, there is a difference between writing about sound and writing sound. The first one keeps the positivist position between subject (writer)/ and object (sound), while the second one breaks the division to “inhabit a multidimensional position as translator between worlds” (12). By departing from listening as the research‟s method practice, theory and method are entangled. Listening works as a mode of practice, but also as technique of the body, skewing subject/researcher and object/sound (4). For Kapchan, listening reflects what is known but also how we come to know (11): “what we hear depends on how we listen and what we listen for” (5). Every act of listening is political and aesthetical and will orient the listener into particular affective directions (12).

The assemblage character of the music and the interdisciplinarity of my approach make the rhythm of this analysis an interconnected space of encounters that must be understood as a whole. For that reason, the thesis is structured to resemble a piece of music: an albazo9, which is also a mestizo musical structure that gathers the North and the South and likewise, my analysis. The main tonality10 of this thesis will be the ones already presented: a decolonial Deleuzoguattarian reading of acoustemology; however, like music modulation11, I propose to work around one main concept in each part: space and time, which will be constructed in a constellation of diverse authors and from the three objects due to the music‟s complexity, whose

9_{Albazo is a lively and festive rhythm of the Ecuadorian highlands. Its name comes from the word alba,} which means dawn. Its popularity is traced where traditional festivities ended and people went home playing this music. Musically, it is characterized by the use of pentaphony and a 6/8 meter. Despite its intimate association with the indigenous culture due to its cultural and musical features, it is considered a

mestizo rhythm by being framed under European musical structure (Mullo 64).

10

It refers to the system that arranges and determinates the scale sounds (key) and frames the relation between sounds.

11

It is the use of other tonalities as sonorous material without changing the main tonality of the music piece.

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diverse layers and inquires cannot be addressed in one particular account-theory nor in one isolated object, keeping the assemblage character of the thesis.

A conventional albazo has an introduction and two main parts: A and B. In part „A,‟ I will delve into the relation between music and space by illustrating how both albums embody a politics of location that produces a sonic sensation that works as territorializing tool. Using the Deleuzoguattarian notion of “Refrain” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), I will delve how diverse sounds/rhythms function as „sound bricks” that delimitate the space: a territorial practice that creates a new placeness and territory. By analyzing the three musical pieces through a cluster of concepts that relate and explain different aspects of space and place (Borja 2017; Escobar 2001; Soja 1996), I will argue how music gives an account of an ecological form that involves a decolonial reading, in which the body merges with the environment that is expressed and constructed acoustically (De la Cadena 2014; Feld 2015; Morton 2007; Watsuji 2006). As part of this understanding, I will explore how in the process of knowing and experiencing the place with and through the acoustics some sounds, rhythms, and frequencies, paraphrasing Ochoa, open an interpretative gap between sounds affection and systems of signification (Aurality 33), in which discursive constructions such as rural/urban, and culture/nature entangle, reflecting how the historical-material conditions from which the music arises problematize those naturalized divisions.

In part B, I will explore the notion of time disclosed in the music by performing a rhythm analysis of music as an assemblage. Suggesting an analogy between music‟s rhythm and time in Modernity, I will delve into how music gives an account of a baroque temporality operating in the music (De Sousa Santos 2016; Echeverria 1998). I will argue how the implementation of the feast and the rite modifies the time and creates an alter plot and distribution of temporality, diverging from the one headed by Western Capitalo-centric Modernity. This section will also include briefly how the two acoustic practices were constructed founding a habitual form of listening in the mestizo that could be challenged by the sonic language.

Hopefully, by focusing on the acoustic from phenomenological-affective approach, I will show how an alter episteme operates. In my opinion, music by the virtue of its structure and operation has the potential to create communion nodes between knowledges, what Boaventura De Sousa Santos calls ecology of knowledge (De Sousa Santos 2014) to rethink more

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possibilities for reflecting upon the world. In this case, to a border zone, as is the case of the

mestizo, that operates within and outside the hegemonic Western Modernity. By disclosing what

the music depicts, I hope to give an account of how despite many voices are not hearing or listening for certain audible techniques, it does not mean they are not part of the political space, since their way to speak or sound could have other types of registers invisible to a logo-eye center ear or untranslatable for the Western ear. I intend to assert how music puts into question its “universal” and abstract understanding by eliciting its multiple entanglement layers to reflect not only what sounds communicate, but also our position and construction from where we apprehend the world. In this case, the mestizo, whose audible experience – including mine within it –gives an account of a microcosms operating with and through sounds. Although it relates to the situational character of both the mestizo and the analysis, this decolonial polyphonic assemblage is part of a larger history of some mestizajes or altered ways of thinking with and

through the senses in order to overcome and suture power and colonial relations, to never

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Part „A‟: Listening bodie„s‟: sounding place„s‟

As the water‟s heart beats in the sounding body of the rain forest, Sanación –which means healing in Spanish– opens the journey of Prender el Alma. Beating repeatedly in the time of a familiar rhythm (⁴/₄ 𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥𝅮 𝅭 𝅘𝅥𝅯 𝅘𝅥 𝄽), the digitalized sound of the dropt merge subtlety with the soft guitar rip, whose accents prepare the canvas for the mountains to come. The flute‟s short pentaphonic melody brushstrokes the familiarity of the rhythm into a sound and rhythm that I know: it is an Andean rhythm, a Danzante12 I guess; naming it is still speculative act (0-0:40m). A pause follows, to make me think, digest what I have just heard: the melody was a fragment of

Vasija de Barro -a traditional Ecuadorian song that evokes indigenous traditions of burial and

death-, but also to hanker for what is coming. It is the force of rhythm, although this time are the bongos-an instrument commonly used by our afro music- that drives you faster, corporeally, vividly into the sound of the guitar, whose melody plays with resonances of Vasija de Barro (Valencia and Benitez) to create the section‟s leitmotif along with the sounds of new percussion instruments: chajchas13, maracas, digital sounds, and nature‟s multiple voices. Each instrument

has created its own talea14, whose circular repetition echoes a ceremonial cadence and come

together juxtaposing one to another to render a space where I am caught. The sonic sensation produced by the music has dislocated me from my here and now to walk across the Andes, Amazon, and Coast, sounding the place I come from.

How could both sonic languages produce a displacement of my body to re-spatialize my “actual space” at the same time as this new space transmits a particular configuration of place? In other words, how can music de-territorialize and re-territorialize simultaneously? In what

12_{It is festive rhythm of a binary tempo, characterized by cadence tempo marked by the bombo or the} tambour (Mullo 64).

13

It is a percussion instrument made of seeds used by the Amazonian and Andean indigenous in their rituals and ceremonies:

14

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follows, I delve into how music embodies a politics of location which is able to render a placeness territory that reflects Ecuador‟s geography while it transforms it.

i. Geographical sounds: music and space

The sounds and rhythms of Neblina de Guápulo, Sanación and Prender el Alma immerse the listener into a journey of multiple soundscapes, in which diverse cultural codes sketch a territory that holds various acoustic practices. In terms of sonic qualities they are hazily comparable, yet their diverse sonic languages contain traces of the place they inhabit talking locally for my body who shares the composer‟s geography . Cultural memory, practices, and traditions are transmitted through the music, at the same time as it is transformed and reconfigured by each composer‟s musical language, showing a similar form of listening and sounding despite their genre difference.

The three pieces, equal to their larger narratives, are connected to Ecuador in their sonic features, entitled, and content. If we extend Cruz‟ pieces to their album, there is an implementation of traditional rhythms, local instruments (maracas, chajchas, bombo, timbales, flutes, quenas, marimba, and guitar) that within Ecuadorian musical history belong or have been implemented by local communities whether they be indigenous, afro descendant or in “popular music”. More importantly, Cruz‟s music echoes a ritualistic function.

In the case of Neblina de Guápulo its name already discloses a place in Quito. Guápulo was founded by the Spaniards as an independent town in XVI century. The place is located in a small plateau of the hills that used to divide the city from the rural areas. Its architecture is between colonial and modern. Nowadays, it is considered part of the urban area of Quito due to the city‟s growth; however, many rural life practices remain, especially, around festivities and agriculture. Their local inhabitants were husipungueros (indigenous workers of the haciendas), yet in the last decades the upper classes have moved there duo to its location, landscape, and exotization of the colonial architecture. This gentrification entails the continuation of colonial relations of power, in which lower-indigenous classes are still treated as exploited, displaced, and disposable subjects. The road that connects the place with the city is called Conqueror‟s Avenue and it leads to the top of hill where one of the upper-class Quito modern neighborhoods is located.The place

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is portrayed with a climatologic characteristic: the fog (neblina) as constituve and representative element of the place. Moving forward to its larger narrative, Yangana makes references to Ecuador‟s territory: six of its thirteen compositions are entitled from specific places in Ecuador15

, whereas the rest of the music pieces refer to specific objects, figures, traditions, or aspects of the daily life16.

Overall, both music languages reflect a strong connection with the place the composers inhabit. According to J. Eisneber, sounds are attached with a spatial narrative due to our process of audition, in which the listener tends towards a spatial association (193). Despite Eisneber‟s reference to the instinct for seeking the sound‟s origin -what produced it and where it came from-, this spatial narrative can be extended to a broader spatiality. For examplefrom-, there is an association between pentaphony to indigenous communities from the highland region in my description of Sanación. Although this is the scale per excellence used in their music; there is a tendency –even in my listening- to enfranchise indigenous to a couple of musical features and to rurality. Confining their sonic languages under a Western comprehension of music under rational-“universal” categories (melody, pitch, harmony, rhythm, and so on) and to a particular zone: the Andes. What is beyond this association? Is music working as an internal frontier displacing bodies and places along with particular sentiments? Does this tendency reflect a form of listening? Although these questions will be addressed fully in the following chapter, it is necessary to introduce them for understanding the territory in which the music displays.

This type of association crystalizes an aural frame of reference (Titus, “Walking like a Crab” 290) that operates under a Western musical episteme based on a representative form of accessing knowledge base on a logo-form (vision) (Pallasmaa 2012; Mignolo 2011). Thinking music in terms of scores encompasses a subtle displacement from a hearing phenomenon to a linguistic experience implying an understanding of culture in terms of writing and conceptualization (Holguín and Shifres 2015; Santamaría 2007; Castro-Gomez 2002). Within representational form, there is a propensity of hierarchy, fixity, and stasis hidden in the echo of „Truth‟ and original (O‟Sullivan 12; Rancière 59). As Ochoa argues:

15

Yangana, Tupo Salasaca, Diablo de Tandapi, Atardecer en Quito, Neblina de Guápulo, Ronda de Saraguro.

16

La imprenta de Antonio, El ángel feo, Amapola Sisa, Yaraví de la lluvia, Pasillo en triciclo, Guaguas de pan, Pasillo para el tío Enrique.

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Once sound is described and inscribes into verbal description and intro writing it becomes a discursive formation that has the potential of creating and mobilizing and acoustic regimens of truths, a power-knowledge nexus in which some modes of perceptions, description, and inscription of sound are more valid than others in the context of power relations (33).

In the contexts of Latin America, besides fostering a particular Western philosophical discourse, it adhered to trope of alterity discourse, from which the „Other‟ was constructed (Dussel 1994; Ochoa Gautier 2014).

If naming comes with a set of characteristics that works as an operational process and a deifying-performative tool, so do sounds (Bull and Back 15; Cimini and Moreno 12–15) Therefore, what problematic emerges from this action? What power relations are involved in my associative form of listening? As a postcolonial nation, the valid aural genres produced in Ecuador are constructed in the relationship between the colonial and the modern (Ochoa Gautier 2014; Bloechl 2008). As mentioned in my introduction, following Ochoa‟s work, there are two acoustic practices historically formed: “the audile techniques cultivated by both the lettered elite and peoples historically considered "nonliterate,"” (Aurality 4). Along “Aurality”, Ochoa illustrates how the audible participate in the creation of the Other‟s features, in which many of the associations inscribe more than sound, but a reflection of understanding the world beyond sonic features. To clarify this, I am referring how when “lettered elites”, or even before the Catholic priests, encounter sounds or functions around them that differ from their own, those were categorized as out of tune, noises, or improper. As Ochoa argues, “in the process of inscribing such listening into writing, the lettered men (and it was mostly men) of the period simultaneously described them, judged them, and theorized them” (4).

Coming from the National Conservatory of Music, my point of entry into indigenous and Afro music is conceptually meager. My limited musical description is based on few studies of national composers of the late XIX century and early XX, whose works, influenced by European nationalistic movements, was about our “folk” (Moreno 1949; Moreno 1972; Salgado 1989). They focused on indigenous communities from the Andean region, neglecting Coast and Amazon indigenous and Afro descendants. Indigenous music was typified under western

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categories, indicating pentaphony as the scale per excellence accompanied by ternary and quaternary rhythms (6/8, 4/4). Those descriptions were filled by moral and reductive adjectives such us simple, repetitive, melancholic, nostalgic, and sad. This reflects how Quijano‟s colonial

matrix of power continues leaving its traces on the way we listen today. To not deviate from the

space as our main concern, I will come back to this point in the following section.

The referred association is also triggered in Neblina de Guápulo, whose introduction drives me to the present, in an urban and calm environment due to the piano‟s contemporary melody with brushstrokes of impressionist and expressionist styles (00:00 00:20). However, the 6/8 syncope sound of the cajón disrupts the melody to introduce an albazo -for the next sixteen bars I am moving synchronized with the rhythm and my mind travels to the mountains where the piano‟s pentaphonic melodyresonates indigenous festivities and a sense of rurality, dislocating me to the past where the memories of Guápulo popular festivities mingles with other indigenous festivities. The sense of place and rurality are not mere static representations. Their quotidian time is reimagined in their feast form. Through the sounds and rhythm, I am able to recall the sensation of the feast, the community, their yumbos17 and livelihoods that this space entails (00:21 00:50). Nonetheless, the modulation of the melody to an upper tone produces a

pandiatonism18 where the multiple voices start clashing and the albazo in its rural and traditional color becomes more urban and dissonant, as Guápulo, where rural and cultural practices of our past coexist with the conflictive modernity of any Andean city (01:00 01:28).

My conceptual association between sound, place, and people tends towards grouping indigenous or afro community sounds with rurality and euro-american sounds with and urban and modern narrative, fitting Thomas Turino‟s indexical music understanding19

. This is to say, when personal experience of hearing music played by particular individuals or social groups or/and in particular regions works as medium to delineate people‟s social identities enclosed into a specific place (8,9). However, the audible experience is entangled in this discursive dichotomy. While listening to Neblina de Guápulo, as well as the entire Mancero‟s album, these seemingly

17

Yumbos are dancers that recall the Yumbo culture (800-1600 AC) located in the lowlands of

northwestern Quito (Borja 3), and a type of dace in the ritual of Yumbada: a war festivity that thankful the past and aims to reestablish harmony and peace (Mullo 141).

18

Pandiatonism is a type of harmony that allows many tonalities at the same time. Looking it

metaphorically, it allows the parallel existence not only of tonalities, but times, places, and subjectivities. 19

For Turino, an indexical association occurs when the sing and object are experienced together in our actual life (8).

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separated spheres are in the same space and I experienced both simultaneously. This led me to question why I associate city-urban-western/countryside-rural-local within a country where industrialization attempts exist precariously (Acosta 2006)? Are rural and urban enough categories to analyze the space sounded by the music?

For Edward Soja, space must be understood from a historical and geographical materialist approach, in which it and its political organization express social relations, but also reacts upon them (Postmodern Geographies 7). Rural and urban are two rhythmical spatial containers that hold particular representations, daily practices, landscapes, and modes of production, remarking their difference as two separated spaces abide by a dialectical relation due to and for capitalism (Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic” 2008; Monte-mór 2012). The development of capitalism in the South diverges from the North: Ecuador‟s extractivism and agro-exportation mode of production is constructed in complex network between the colonial heritage, the natural abundance of resources, the global market, and the cosmologies of Afro and Amerindian cultures, which have resisted capitalism system (Acosta 2006). Subsequently, the spatiality created by this is different, as well as its understanding.

The regionalization of the territory between Coast, Highlands, and Amazon with their own logics is the first spatial distribution and configuration in Ecuador‟s spatiality (Acosta 26–29). Although there differences between countryside and cities, life always exists among the regions; the consolidation of the modern urban project -concentrated in Quito and Guayaquil- in the late XX century was fragile, contradictory, and heterogeneous; the cities urbanized rural lands, circumscribed colonial haciendas, and received a “rural exodus”20(Carrion and Erazo 2013), forming a city, in the case of Quito, of several cities joining and overlapping (Borja 168). Precisely, Neblina de Guápulo makes audible the limitations of rural and urban categories to understand the space fully. Its fragmentary character that oscillates between traditional and an amorphous modernity bouncing among them, sounds the contradiction and harmony of this mingled spaced. Through its festive colors, the music sounds Guápulo‟s social space: a place that attunes the description above.

20

The process of the capital modernization started in 1960. The discovery of oil (1970) accelerated the urban modern project. The urban area increased 500%, the peripheries start to developed and the city expanded disorganized and unplanned (Borja 163). Despite Ecuador‟s aim to industrialize and modernize under the Economic model of the region, it did not succeed due to international conditions that already condemn it to fail, resulting in a precarious industralized model (Acosta).

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In this regard, the sonic sensation brings Soja‟s concept of geography as the third space of “heteropias”21_{. Adopting Foucault‟s idea, Soja‟s space holds a multiplicity of spaces, and within}

them, a set of relations that delineates sites and relations that are constituted in every society taken diverse forms and changing as „history unfolds‟ (qtd. in Soja, Postmodern Geographies 12). However, in my description, the music led me towards an understanding of the space from its cultural memory, affect, and connection to the territory in its topographical dimension. Soja‟s “trialectic” dimension of space as: lived, perceived, and conceived (Thirdspace 68), introduces to the Lefebvrian space the symbolical dimension: “ the space is directly lived, with all its intractability intact, a space that stretches across images and symbols that accompany it, the space of „inhabitant‟s and „users‟”(Thirdspace 67). His arguments provide a ground to think a livable space mingled with habitants‟ bodies, to think from its locality beyond capitalist modes of production to its relation in terms of ecosophy (Guattari 2000).

For the anthropologist Arturo Escobar, following Edward Casey, we are „placelings‟: we always find ourselves in places: ”to live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in” (143). „Place‟ is the experience of a particular location with some measures of groundness, a sense of boundaries, and connections to everyday life (140–43). Place, body, and environment integrate with each other; places gather “things, thoughts, and memories in particular configurations” (143), which I sustain can be expressed and experienced through sounds. Returning to the music description, the relation with the space prompted by the sounds, reactivate a phenomenological and affect encounter with it. Sounds and place mutually designate, going beyond their material features to the sentiments they produce in the body. There is a movement from space to place that sounds seem to reactivate through an affective and phenomenological connotation.

In my conversation with Daniel Mancero regarding Yangana´s process of composition, he states:

I have the fortune to record places. When I am in a place I get the recording of it that later I translates into a musical idea [...] The experimentation at the time of Yangana was composing thinking about places. I closed my eyes and started playing [and] thinking about places,

21

Heteropias for Foucault are “those singular spaces to be found in some given social practices whose

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trying not to change the image regarding what I played. Then, I started writing the things that kept the image […] other times, the music ideas were based on the sonorities of the place and the experience you felt in it.22

Similarly, Nicola Cruz‟s manifest the album is related to the process of:

…soul awakening and how this awakening of consciousness for me is reflected trough music. In the album there are many songs with a lot of ritual involve… For me is about seeking the highest point between music and consciousness that the ancient traditions: indigenous or afro cosmologies inspire me. Traditions that I value and I try to learn from our ancestor and how the things were done before. Also, I question why things happened that way [silence]. It is interesting coming from a small country and being able to tell something at a macro dimension at the same time that I feel responsibility for showing my country, as an imprint of what is Ecuador.23

Both albums enclose Ecuador‟s place woven by the composers‟ personal experiences. Music is the reflection of the place and the reconstruction of it. The musical‟s narratives resemble how the subject‟s aurality – this is to say their form of listening and sounds transduction (sounding) – and the „place‟ in Escobar‟s sense, are constructed in a relational ontology that resonates Guattari‟s three ecologies that involves a deep engagement with the phenomenology of perception between body, place, and sound. In Fled terms, Yangana and Prender el Alma sounds open an “experimental nexus of sonic sensations” (“Acoustemology” 14), in which the place-based body enhances its positions and participates actively in the production and transmission of knowledge for both the listener and the composer/musicians.

However, if the „place‟ entails location and position, in which “elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence” (De Certeau 117; Escobar 2001), what happens when two or more things inhabit the same position? As in Sanación‟s multiple taleas, Neblina de Guápulo‟s

22

Mancero, Daniel. Personal Interview. 8 December 2016 23

See Cruz, Nicola. Interview by ZZK Records. Quito, 15 December 2015.

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pandiatonism, or Prender el Alma‟s juxtaposition, is then music placeless only a „place,‟ or it is also a reconfiguration of space?

Music placeness is not only a territorial reflection, since there is a displacement and reconfiguration of it. Concordantly with the assemblage‟s process, the music does not keep Ecuador‟s three geographical regions separate nor rural and urban, or past and present; conversely, they are rhythmically assembled24. In Neblina de Guápulo‟s fragmentary space urban and rural comes and goes to confound each other in the sound: from the contemporary introduction to the traditional albazo and then to a dissonant jazz improvisation. Sanación gathers the instruments from the three regions attached to specific cultures, and Prender el

Alma‟s rhythmical convolution between forest sounds, human voices, and acoustical and digital

instruments along with images of Ecuador‟s geography are material example of what an assemblage is and does.

ii. Sounds as bricks: music as de-territorialize/re-territorial practice

If sounds can be the place‟s utterance – an appropriation practice of the composer‟s site –, then, their movement, dislocation, and transformation denote the creation of a territory of its own: a new place, in which the vectors of Ecuador‟s geographies are the main material for their composition. Deleuze and Guattari‟s understanding of music through the notion of refrain

„Ritournello‟ fits perfectly to explain how music practice resembles per excellence the

construction of a territory and its functioning without losing the sense of locality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Through the philosophers‟ metaphor, I will portray how this music is the spoken sound of „place‟: it is able to transmit our geography and construct our relation to it at the same time as it creates a new territory that stands for its own.

Briefly, the refrain is constituted by three stages: anchoring, demarcation, and opening up, which are not a sequence process, rather three aspects at once. It is a territorial assemblage25; “a means of erecting a portable territory that can secure ourselves in trouble situations” (Deleuze

24

Part B will explain this idea.

25_{“We call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into}

territorial motifs and landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains. In the narrow sense, we

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and Guattari 313). Following their line of thought, a refrain can be materialized into a sound, melody, or rhythm, from which an assemblage would emerge. This is to say, they will be the center from which a process of demarcation will start, since for creating a territory already-set-up borders are indispensable (311-12). I will take Sanación as an illustrative example of this process to make it graspable. The anchor of the new piece comes from the traditional song Vasija de

Barro, paraphrasing Cruz, it was this song that inspired the sample of Sanación (ZZK Records).

If we focus on sounds‟ materiality, we can hear from minute (00:29 00:40) how the flute sticks to song‟s musical notes. However, if we move further from the musical technicalities, it is Vasija

de Barro‟s ritualism character and feeling that is maintained along the piece. As Cruz

emphasizes, “what I wanted with Sanación was kept the ritualistic sensation the tradition [referring to Ameriandian and afro cosmologies] have”26.

Within the refrain‟s anchor, the composer‟s way of listening goes beyond the sonic features to music‟s social and symbolical value. There is something functional and collective behind those sounds that come from particular territories and peoples, resonating other form of listening beyond Western conceptions that respond to a local acoustic practice that – as the composer and I perceived – is inscribed in the music, but also in another type of textuality that requires our bodies to alter forms of listening. As a sort of Deleuzian minor art, from whom minor, referring to literature, consists of the revolutionary conditions that literatures outside of the hegemonic narratives have (Bidima 189). For the philosopher, there are three characteristics that makes art

minor: its capacity to break with the habitual formation and hegemonic signifying regimes by its

de-territorizliation, to open the individual onto the political, and to operate through a collective enunciation that comes from a collective production (Bidima 189; O‟Sullivan 69–71). In this case, the use of local or “vernacular language” in Deleuzian words leads the body to be listener organ in a wider spectrum, transgressing the conceptual understanding of music from the hegemonic musical language and working as an alter collective enunciation.

Settling the anchor by de-territorializing it from its original assemblage, the territory starts to shape by expanding itself while it settles its borders, or what Deleuzoguattarian call territorial practices, which keeps the territory stable (314–17). Returning to the piece, before the flute played Vasija de Barro‟s melody, the guitar rip already contained traces of pentaphony and the

26

Cruz, Nicola. Interview by ZZK Records. Quito, 15 December 2015.

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ritualistic cadence was introduced from the beginning through nature voices and the sounding of instruments that are locally used in ritualistic settings, such as the chajchas by Amazonian indigenous groups. Acoustically, the music piece expands its border. It does not stick to the Andean region, as Vasija de Barro does, going beyond to the Amazon, Coats (by the use of bongos and rhythmic patterns), and the city with the use of digital and electronic sounds whose territoriality is associated with the Western and globalized world, also part of Ecuador‟s urban space. All the codes are decoded and transcoded by the composer‟s language to create the new space. These composing materials, as the territory‟s exterior, will work as sort of permeable membrane, establishing limits while allowing porously the introduction of new sonic elements. In other words, the third refrain‟s element is its opening up (Deleuze and Guattari 311,314). Although I linearly divide the stages for explicative purposes, as we could hear in the piece they are entwined.

As I showed, within the refrain‟s operation, the de-territorialization and re-territorialization movement does not restore the old territory; rather they create a new one, which will serve as refrain for another (Deleuze et al. 13; Buchanan 14). This notion of the refrain can be extrapolated to rest of the pieces and their entire narratives. For the French philosophers, every piece of music is an imprint, a signature from the composer‟s style that contains a refrain, yet the territory is constructed broadly when a style is constituted (Deleuze and Guattari 347,348).

From an aesthetic gaze, Mancero and Cruz are in between an impressionist and expressionist artist „capturing‟ the landscape (Rancière, Aisthesis 212). However, it goes further to their artists‟ capacity to play with lights, sounds, and objects for a composition to a form to think and relate with space (Periáñez 2018; Feld, “Acoustemology” 2015). In my previous argument regarding music „placeness‟, the relation between sound, place, and body asserts a phenomenological apprehension of space, in which the body is more than a sponge of sensations, avowing Merleau-Ponty‟s idea that the body “uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently „be at home in' that world, „understand‟ it and find significance in it” (275), as a form of transmitting and constructing knowledge about the world beyond logocentric forms with and through sounds.

The composers‟ recreation and imagined reconstruction of places, memories, ideas, and sensations that have passed through their bodies are perceived and expressed acoustically.

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Alphoso Linger‟s expansive work on Merleau-Ponty‟s body, includes the kinesthetic and affective sensations capable of producing multiple actions-reactions on the body (83). Those dimensions are not necessarily the perception of something – such as physical object –, yet it comes from the relation between the environment and the particular body. The body‟s postural schema is aligned to its spatial and sensory levels, developing some capacities, such as more sensitivity to some sounds, images or particular stimulus according to its ecology (85). This reveals the performative aspect of the space in the body‟s capacity of perception, including an affective disposition that is not only inner process within the subject, as the phenomenologist Bryan Bannon states, but also lies outside the self. Following Heidegger, he argues affects are “a particular form of relationship to one‟s environs” (340). They are not only experiences on the body, but also relations that are determined by the space the body is in (340).

These phenomenological accounts that contemplates the relevance of space are a bridge to understand the place‟s phenomenology sounded by the music, in which the way of listening of both composers are a set of culturally informed bodily and sensory dispositions constructed in and by the place (Rice 101; Kapchan, “Listening Acts” 277). Therefore, the notion of the body coined by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro as: “a bundle of affects and which is the origin of perspective” (478) would be more suitable for this analysis. As we observed around Neblina de

Guápulo and Sanación, the composers‟ listening acts have performative capacities; they

represent sounds as much as they transduce27 them into another medium (music) by their bodies as the center of perception (Kapchan, “The Splash or Icarus” 5). Music will crystalize in the following section a relational multiplicity from which a different form of being and relationship with space emerges.

A new Placeness territory

Prender el Alma elucidates sonically and visually the animated and transformational

character of this new musical territory constructed and expressed by the music. This is to say, a new place-based network of “disclosive spaces” that provides a set of practices to relate with one

27

Transduce means “to alter physical nature or medium of (a signal); to convert variations in (medium)

into corresponding variations in another medium” (EOD). For Adrian Mackenzie “to think trasnductively is to mediate between different orders, to place different realities in contact, and to become something different” ( qtd. in Helmreich 227).

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self, others, and environment, producing a self-container web of meanings (Escobar 167) that will reflect an ecology form of relating and inhabiting place and space.

By taking elements borrower from Ecuador‟s geography –its environment, its heterogeneous places, and the global culture –, the composers transform and assemblage them producing a new site that articulates the two acoustic practices. As an assemblage, music operates in double movement: content and expression (Deleuze et al. 8). It will be the territory‟s signifying register: a locution of its content, but also as an expression of it. It is through its sounding, in the process of musicking when the territories‟ properties are resembled and apprehended, as my following close reading will depictin the case of mestizo. The process of musicking for both the composer and the listener materializes the relationality between bodies and environment, in which the space is understood affectively and Nature has a central role.

Along the music video, I listening-watching to some of the historical material conditions of my body constructed in multiplicity of vectors. The rhythmical pace of the sounds and images start a soundscape journey of Ecuador‟s geography. During the first 10 seconds of the song, I walk along the bass riff in the rainforest and Coast: I recognize their vegetation that mingles one to another. After few seconds, a distorted male voice speaks to me in Quichua, yet its voice as a vehicle of linguistic expression fails (Dolar 27). The voice is not signical to me, its speechlessness reflects Ecuador‟s coloniality of language that has endorsed the inaccessibility to indigenous cosmology by mestizos, even more, when it is an oral culture. This apartheid not only separates „them (indigenous)‟ from „us (mestizos)‟, but the mestizo itself, since it is my mestiza body that has been historically dismembered.

However, I continue the journey along the voice and the percussion instruments that gradually do a crescendo accompanied by images of: Andean indigenous women inside Amazonia flowers (Fig. 1), waterfalls and vegetation of the Amazonian and Coast region (Fig. 2), and scenes of Ecuador‟s daily life that juxtaposes with nature, such as different markets and their local practices (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4).

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Fig. 1: Andean indigenous women inside Amazonia flowers.

Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 18 March 2018

Fig. 2: Waterfalls and vegetation

Fig. 3: Bandas de pueblo (local orchestras) and street market

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As if the music forces me to recall that the market is not a picturesque scene of Latin America‟s landscape: flamboyant of colours and textures, of “exotic” fruits, vegetables, and herbs to be photographed and posted, nor the core of Capitalism; rather it is an ambivalent geographical space in Soja‟s sense. The tianguez (market) has been for us an historical space of encounter and exchange, where indigenous, afros, montuvios and campesinos from all three regions have traveled to exchange their products periodically. The market was and still is not only a place where products are trade, but where traditions and local practices of the past remain. In Lefebvre‟s words paradoxically, the market in Prender el Alma is perceived as a social space: portrayed as a product of social relations between its physical form, instrumental knowledge, and symbolical practice from which the West, Amerindians, and Afros confound (The Production of

Space 1991).

The new territory created by the musical piece, as in the whole music, is based on the ecology of the composer‟s space. The music sounds and portrays how the composers‟ ears are drowned in their environment, resonating Murray Shaffer‟s notion of soundscape, as a form of assessing sonic environments (Eisenberg 197). Although within Shaper‟s soundscape sound is central to understanding space and the interaction between humans and their environment (Wrightson 12; Eisenberg 197), it holds a pictorial echo where sounds instead of the images are there to be contemplated/heard, keeping the distance between agency and perception, as Steven Feld argues (“Acoustemology” 15), but also independently to the subject‟s cosmology and power relations.

However, in my process of listening that holds intention28 (Kapchan, “The Splash or Icarus” 5; Rice 99), I am able to listen with other registers, to disseminate some Quichua words and find its meaning in its relation with Ecuador‟s images and sounds, to reactivate the soundscape in a based-process manner that addresses my body corp-oraly. Adriana Maya coined this concept as a form to understand the body as a holder of cultural and historical memories, from which group histories, traditions, and forms of understanding the world can be transmitted through bodily

28

Hearing is considered a passive mode of auditory perception; while listening entails an action of attention towards a sound (Rice 99). Listening is grounded and requires hearing, however is not reducible to it and will entail a disposition of the subject (Rice 99).

Mestizo Music: a Political Topography of Diachronic Times. Inscribing my mestiza aural experience of Yangana and Prender el Alma