Manongo Mujica & Terje Evensen - Paracas Ritual (2021)

Manongo Mujica is a Peruvian percussionist, composer and visual artist. His constant search for sounds, from native to electronic, has even led him to compose music from silence. Norway’s Terje Evensen specialises in improvised modern jazz combined with electronic elements, creating spacious and dramatic soundscapes of profound intensity.

Paracas Ritual, the new album by Manongo Mujica and Terje Evensen, is the result of an investigation carried out by the duo in the desert and bay of Paracas, south of Lima, on the Peruvian coast. Long days of deep listening and recordings of sounds from the desert and the bay have served as material and inspiration for this first collaborative project. The album also includes photographs of the Paracas landscapes made by Pauline Barberi and paintings by Manongo himself, also inspired by these landscapes, which were in turn the result of a previous visual project and which have served as a point of reference and complement.

The visual is one of the affinities between Mujica and Evensen. In their artistic careers, they both have shown an interest in exploring the worlds of synesthesia, in the idea of listening to images and in using sounds as pictorial material. Hence, listening to the desert is here also a way of listening to the visual field of the landscape, turning it into an acoustic impression of the mind. And Paracas Ritual is composed of those impressions.

The four pieces that make up the album show a diversity of explorations that combine electronic sounds, field recordings and the use of a wide variety of percussion instruments, whose complex montage and narrativity generate compositions in the manner of a soundtrack.

Paracas Ritual is a blend of ambient, sound art, meditative percussion music, free improvisation and jazz. It is, therefore, an ambitious album that courses through a wide range of languages, but it is precisely in its voracious search that it manages to venture into unknown sound terrain, as abstract and dissonant as it is melodic and rhythmic. And as much as it reminisces about Paracas, it also reflects on the musical creative act that is defined here as an encounter between the time of listening and the time of making sounds.