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LP
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BR 192LP
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Buh Records presents Selva Selva, the debut album by Wayku, a project led by guitarist and researcher Percy A. Flores Navarro, originally from Tarapoto, in the Peruvian Amazon. The album centers the electric guitar, blending traditional jungle sounds with contemporary approaches to explore new textures, rhythms, and expressions. Wayku emerged in late 2022 after Flores's previous project Motilones de Tarapoto. It reflects a dialogue among Amazonian music, rock, and jazz, while also drawing on Brazilian music, tropical rhythms, and other popular expressions from the jungle. The sound feels organic and evolving, rooted in tradition yet open to modern languages. According to its creator, the album seeks to renew the Amazon's repertoire by adapting it to contemporary sonic languages. Selva Selva weaves three strands of Amazonian popular music: sounds and instruments recorded in ethnographic archives, traditional folk ensembles, and tropical jungle bands. Flores Navarro's ethnographic research in Indigenous communities of San Martín and Loreto has profoundly informed Wayku's vision. His compositions interlace narratives of Indigenous resistance with traditional aesthetics, modern harmony, electric instrumentation, and symphonic elements, balancing formal exploration with cultural commitment. Across eleven tracks, Selva Selva offers a journey through native communities while reflecting the cosmopolitan realities of Amazonian cities. Songs such as "Carnaval en la selva" and "Por la marginal reimagine pandilla," a festive Amazonian genre of lively rhythms, flutes, percussion, and community ties. Wayku projects pandilla into the present, amplifying its vitality with contemporary arrangements. This work continues a lineage dating to the 1970s, when tropical Amazonian bands incorporated electric guitar into pandilla, creating the form now known as electric pandilla. Wayku revives and expands that language, asserting a discourse that empowers Amazonian musicians and raises the visibility of their work on broader stages. Selva Selva was recorded between January and March 2024 in Morales, San Martín, with Michel Paredes on bass. Flores performed the rest and handled recording and digital mastering. Vladimir Ivanov completed analog mastering and Gonzalo de Montreuil produced the artwork. The album is released by Buh Records, supported by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture's 2023 Cultural Stimulus Grants.
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