Julián Mayorga - El día que el Tolima se hundió hasta el fondo del mar
“Listening to Julián Mayorga is hearing the current Colombian sound taken to even more exciting terrain. His music is everything that defines him: experimentation, humor, reflection, passion.” -- Vogue (Mexico)
Avant-garde Colombian singer-songwriter Julián Mayorga returns with his ninth album, a clattering, absurdist slice of post-cumbia psychedelia. Chak Chak Chak Chak is a feverish mix of angular electric guitars, circuit-bent beats, found percussion and rapid-fire incantations, with influences that include Tom Zé, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. Frenetic energy meets satirical wit. Surrealist fables entwined with defiant sonics.
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Part technicolour fever dream, part polyrhythmic Dadaist frolic, Chak Chak Chak Chak is the latest full-length from avant-garde Colombian singer-songwriter Julián Mayorga, an album that brilliantly brings to life his absurdist post-cumbia infused psychedelia.
Broadcasting from the fertile cauldron of his current headquarters in Madrid, where he has lived for the past ten years, Mayorga has created the next compelling phase of his self-proclaimed “timbre rebellion.” Inspired by the sounds of unconventional musical instruments – frying pans, mortar and pestle, knives and plates – his debut release on Glitterbeat (his ninth in all) curdles with an uncanny energy and satirical wit.
Mayorga’s songs are layered, multi-dimensional constructs. They evoke the illusory edge-lands that emerge where urban and rural meet, and echo memories originating in the working-class neighbourhoods of his Tolima birthplace – places abundant with greasepaint and grime, vitality and colour.
As heard on the spry chucho shake-up of the track ‘El día que Tolima se hundió hasta el fondo del mar (The day Tolima sank to the bottom of the sea)’ and the screwball cowboy screed of ‘Arda la ciudad cuando arrecie el monte (Let the city burn when the mountain rages),’ the vistas of Chak Chak Chak Chak are at times earmarked with a decidedly anti-capitalist agrarian model of Andean futurism. “When I return to Colombia, I always spend several days in the countryside,” Mayorga explains, “It always seems to me that people there are living in the future, in an almost anarchic community existing beyond the intermediation of the police or state.”
Uh, all my neighbours descend from the hills,
and in a parade sing,
a clandestine ancient and anti-civilisation song.
-- Arda la ciudad cuando arrecie el monte (Let the city burn when the mountain rages)
Finding further inspiration for his sonic fables in the magical writings of Latin American authors such as Juan Rulfo, María Luisa Bombal, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Reinaldo Arenas and the British poet Brian Catling, Mayorga’s music transmutes the debris of deformity, despair and disgust into chimeric, frenetic song forms, teeming with rat gods, undead dogs, ghost towns and greenback basilisks. With a surrealist’s zeal he refashions the grotesque and gruesome.
I dream of snakes covered in salt
I'm collecting coins adding crumbs
They sprout from the stones I can't avoid them
Caution is not enough
They stab me in the back at the end of the month.
-- Sueño con culebras (I dream of snakes)
Chak Chak Chak Chak vividly highlights Mayorga’s radicalised guitar work, a fecund approach referencing the angular stylings of cult axe heroes such as Kiko Dinucci (Meta Meta), Marc Ribot and, particularly, Arto Lindsay. Riding upon this inventive fretwork, he injects the album with vocal performances marked by rapid-fire incantations, animalistic whoops and hollers and gibbering psychobabble, and a rhythmic scattershot of beats generated by circuit-bent electronics, traditional percussive instruments (tambora and guacharaca) and repurposed objects (giant oil drums and sundry junkyard scrap).
It is indeed not at all surprising that Mayorga counts daring, idiom-defying musical oddballs like Tom Zé, Tom Waits, Renaldo and the Loaf, Captain Beefheart and The Residents (whose classic 1978 cut ‘Semolina’ is reconfigured here in an intoxicating locomotive rush) as kindred influences.
“We have prayed to a giant, ferocious opossum, to come down from the sky to avenge us,” Mayorga writes in the album’s liner notes. “Eat the rich, we implore him, and he answers us with a thick music, a mixture of whistling and clattering, the bones of the richest: Chak-Chak-Chak-Chak.”
The album’s offbeat allegories and anti-capitalist broadsides ooze tropical mischief, dystopian noise and a love for folkloric bestiaries. They are a gloriously bewildering assault on the totems of hegemony and tyranny – cultural, personal, political and musical. An unrelenting sonic cyborg engine – part-machine, part-human – with spluttering gears, gnashing teeth and stuttering cogwheels grinding up against the shrapnel alluded to in the album’s onomatopoeic title.
Chak Chak Chak Chak is Julian Mayorga divining gold amid the ordure. “We need to give birth to beauty, the world needs… people need to be moved. Our manifest destiny is to delve into the beauty of the universe,” he states, before wryly adding, “It just happens that I love the idea of beauty in decay, in ugliness, and even in death.”
Julián Mayorga’s liner notes for Chak Chak Chak Chak
The forest is bursting at the seams. A lightning bolt has struck the center of a guadua plant and has excited the whole thicket. Grasses, murrapos, mycelium, badeas and other sweet and bitter creepers grow incessantly. The forest comes down from the forest and wraps the city. Bush, scrap metal, cement, cocuyos and the scales of one hundred and fifty thousand moths raise an electric and impossible structure in the very center of Ibagué. The ocobos are in bloom but this time their flowers are red and drip a viscous liquid that the beasts drink and that makes the opossums and pigeons of the Plaza Murillo sing. We stand looking at this magnetic structure that sings in a chorus with the raging mountain that, lo and behold, this is our destiny. The cockroaches call us, they ask us, vibrating under the cement slabs, to come back. Tolima is two hundred, fifteen hundred, seven hundred and fifty thousand years old. Let the city burn when the mountain rages.
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We have prayed to a giant, ferocious opposum to come down from the sky and avenge us. Eat the rich! we implore him and he answers to us with a thick music, a mixture of whistling and clattering of bones, the bones of the richest: chak-chak-chak-chak.
