A crisp blue sky spread over my head as I cycled towards ALICE at Stairway. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the Condori-Xamanek bill was an alternative to Distortion, but it certainly was an option to actually meet around music, as opposed to a street festival that feels as though it no longer has music at its core.
The attendees were enjoying the warm evening on Alice’s outdoor patio when I arrived. No one rushed to enter the venue until a second before the first act began. A second of sun can’t be spilled in this city, it is a scarce good.
Xenia Xamanek took the stage amidst their modest gear setup and a visible Palestinian scarf hanging from their microphone. The first part of their performance moved like a roving ambient composition. However, once they picked up the electric guitar, they entered the more nightmarish corner of dream pop. From those first moments, I could not foresee the ease with which they would weave a multi-genre tapestry.
Potent drum beats filled the room, accompanied by dubbed-out basslines, field recordings, and keyboard loops. Clad in a red shirt, Xamanek moved assuredly across the stage as a prerecorded sax (an instrument they play) bloomed, while their voice held all the elements together. The audience began to sway from side to side, their bodies responding. For a moment, their piece made me feel that these were the Balearic sounds Zealand could produce. Island bliss. But it is not that simple, as Xamanek’s Honduran roots inform their music, and most of the lyrics are sung in Spanish.
A dubby bassline over reggaeton kicks took over. We were heading towards an energy-intensive section, and even though Xamanek did not address the audience with words, one could feel that they were in it. The crowd loosened up and danced, all fears of missing out on some sunshine dispelled. Field recordings provoked flashes of my childhood – a mother speaking in Spanish – and I was assured that Xamanek’s music stems from emotion. Yet emotions are complex and on this occasion, we were asked to dance to them, as they sang “Tengo llanas de llorar, tengo ganas de gritar” (“I feel like crying, I feel like screaming”) while drawing elements from bachata, bolero, reggaeton, musique concrète, and club music.
A pause. They picked up the guitar to prepare for their final piece, a sort of deconstructed ballad that borrowed as much from Reich as it did from Latin soul, and which, under the red lights, threw me into a Mulholland Drive headspace – specifically the Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” sung by Rebekah del Rio. It was a stripped-down culmination of a rich and enthralling performance. After Xenia Xamanek left the stage, the crowd dispersed and headed outside draped in a lively atmosphere.
Back inside the venue, I took a look at the gear setup for the next act: mixer, sampler, and two keytars lying on a stand. Chuquimamani-Condori walked lightly to the stage, wearing cowboy boots and a western hat. They immediately hit the sampler: “DJ! DJ Ocelote! DJ!”, the words boomed as if lifted from live sonidero ads. The performance was straightforward, raw, and stripped of any gimmicks. It encompassed most of the tracks from their last album, DJ E.
Starting off, we were thrown into “Breathing”, the first piece from DJ E, which in a way synthesizes the album’s motives: collages of Andean folk, noise splurts, huayno, and electronic rhythms. Condori smiled, not only as someone happy to be on stage but also as someone willing to concede the relevance of their art. Between the tracks, they offered genuine thanks to the audience which felt warm as there was no microphone on stage.
The first moments were a prelude to the next movements. Once Condori picked up the keytar to deliver renditions of the album’s centerpieces, the performance took on a radiant magnitude. “Engine” and “Return” transformed into an ecstatic revelation, a hinge of immanence, worldliness and the divine, running through a vigorous binomial decolonization filter. The section was a motorik force driven by Bolivian wind instruments, percussion, and walls of noise. It was loud, repetitive, and yet without the bravado of the latest incarnations of Swans or the droney reclusiveness of a Peter Kember live set. Under Condori’s command, joy was grim. This was body music for the gut, for fingernail gunk, a saturated shower of keytar noise. Condori smiled.
Their sound was massive, hyper-compressed, and distorted. It felt much bigger than on record. They once said in an old interview: “The older I get, the uglier I want my music to feel, to be.” But their version of ugly is not a negation of beauty, it is the signature of the ineffable, a hint of Schelling’s “sacred terror” that offers a glimpse into the impenetrable mystery, where all that is violent collides. The audience – no longer a fragmented collection of scattered dots – was pulled into this void, and I would not dare claim that we were transfixed, but I can attest to being drawn into a vacuum of sound and viscera that was also a promise of Condori’s own version of spiritual release.
The performance ended with the almost playful “Until I Find You Again” and Chuquimamani-Condori left the stage after uttering: “Thanks for coming out.” As I was leaving the venue, I heard someone voice a question that I also had in mind: “Did they sample the piano opening from Tupac’s ‘Changes’?” Once outside, I had a hunch, a more significant one: that their music was a form of aesthetic resistance rooted in concrete socio-political concerns. The sonic saturation was necessary, for resisting calls for truth.
Outside the sky refused to darken, it was still summer and we were impelled to find our truths.
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