IN STEREO

With the music, I have come to interpret the feeling of the time, of people’s lives, to share with the community. Most of us here are builders, we have been police, we have worked in coffee factories, but that does not have much relation to what we do with the music: trying so that it does not die, although we are not completely natives. Here in the Mint, which belongs precisely to colonial times, a man – I think he is a restorer there – invited us to play an instrument that had been lost, the Afro-Bolivian saya. In that sense, there has been a transition from colonialism. Obviously, that was not so original, because we know that Africans came later. But the most wonderful thing was that this gentleman gave me that idea. We wanted to demonstrate which was the colonial music and which was the music of the natives. Each native instrument has its agricultural calendar. 

 

Well, we are in the urban area here, but in the countryside, it is really based on the agricultural calendar. There is a peculiarity in those of us who are devoted to Andean music: logically, we are more rooted in polytheism, the Andean gods. In the past, we were colonised by Catholicism – we are Catholic, maybe, by baptism. But in the background, those who are devoted to this type of music, we are rooted in polytheism. We believe in the Sun Father and the Earth Mother, we believe in the mountains, that the Earth has its own life; we believe in this conversation with nature. That’s why we are the living heritage. As long as there is faith, the culture is maintained. In other countries, there is no faith, so they steal. That’s what we know as folklore. That’s what we know as ‘God’. If we do not believe in anything, we are lost. – Miguel