Sebastian Concha – Sirinu Vol. V
Wednesday, 16 September⋅2:20 – 3:00pm
This afternoon at 2:20pm Sebastian Concha presents ‘Sirinu Vol. V’ – a territorial recording project focused on ritual soundscapes of northern Chile – the wild heart of Qullasuyu, where the dead dwell alongside the living.
Sebastian grew up in Arica, a northern border city, a cultural crossroads between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. There he experienced (often without knowing it) deeply significant processes for the social fabric of Abya Yala: rural-urban migration, acculturation, structural violence, and more recently, a revitalization of ancestral knowledge that today questions from a practical and situated search: how to regenerate that knowledge and turn it into action? How to embody a cosmo-praxis?
This is the fifth recording journey through the Qullasuyu, unfolding between the shadowed foothills and the vast, wind-carved Altiplano. A pilgrimage in search of the tata of the waters, the ancient keeper of currents and memory.
These field recordings gather the living pulse of the Andes: flutes that tremble like cold dawn and the distant thunder of drums woven through village carnivals. Laughter, footsteps, ritual calls and the whisper of highland winds drift in and out, blurring the line between music and landscape.
Rather than fixed compositions, these are moments of encounter, ephemeral alignments of people, landscape and time. Each piece functions as both document and offering, preserving sounds that resist capture even as they are recorded. What unfolds is less an archive than a passage: an invitation to listen closely, to follow the currents of breath and memory and to glimpse the unseen forces that continue to animate the musical life of the Andes.
Recorded by Sebastián Concha in 2024 in Tiwanaku, Khanapata, Puerto Pérez and El Alto in Bolivia and Quebrada de Livilcar, Montegrande, Elqui Valley, San Miguel de Azapa and Arica in Chile.
Mixed and edited by Pablo Picco between 2024 and 2025 in Salsipuedes, Córdoba, Argentina.
