Transductions and Surlógicas Volume II

You know, it’s in the plants, it’s so simple...and the wind...is observation. Nature whistles with the reeds. It’s full of plants that are there, they’re cracked and you breathe through them and they sound.

There’s an acoustic matter that develops amid nature, with nature. The flute is a cut reed, remember that documentary about those old men over in Bolivia that cut the reeds and go to the wind atop the mountain, it isn’t them who breathe, it’s the wind, so there’s a clear relationship. Breath...breathe in and breathe out and if you don’t, you die. This nature is that simple. And that this instrument relies on the breath one gives to live is an interesting metaphor. You deliver your vitality through breath, that question vibrates and produces that sound. The most beautiful of that type of flute is the complete relationship that it requires with someone else. Piii paaa piii paaa (imitating the flute’s sound). And that has to do with breath, if the most wonderful thing about that is breathing, because you need a partner that breathes together with you, who alternates and continues breathing. You play in perpetuity, the sound never cuts because two people are playing, each with their breath, rather, each one giving their life. Deep down, the flute gives back to you something incredible that cleans your mind and heart with hyperventilation, oxygenation, with movement, with sound, with vibration, with everything that it produces. General vibrations journey through body and space. When you properly play a flute, or sing properly and afterwards remains quiet, you hear differently. That’s what Chino flutes do also, they open your sound swarm jjjjjjjjjhhhhhhhhhhhhh (imitating the flute’s sound) they completely open your sound and mental spectrum.

Exactly, and that happens when the Baile Chino begins, suddenly it warms up and suddenly a moment arrives in which the thing jjjjjjjhhhh (imitation the flute’s sound) sets and goes wild.
The sound of the flute ultimately has a knowledge, it’s a learning of the vibration that was born from the human’s encounter with this piece of stick over many years. Before that relationship, there was no learning and once you stop doing it, it’s extinguished. That sound that leaves in that moment has been preceded by thousands of sounds that have been played in central Chile, that’s its brilliance. In Pachacamita they have been playing for at least 500, 600 years, 700 years perhaps. That sound has memory because it’s alive, independent jjjjjhhhh (imitating the flute’s sound) and it can be extinguished, supposedly? I don’t know if it extinguishes, better said, it remains in some plane of the universe.

Of course, something like that! It’s an apprenticeship that is from the same flute and those same gestures. Those gestures have also been repeated for 700 years and have a force, they have a power. We know that in the shamanic knowledge of America, the importance of positioning is essential, of the gestures, of the repetitive dances of the Chinos are knowledge that is directly transmitted through gestures and sound, rather, through the doing of the ritual. Furthermore, the festivals have happened in the same places for hundreds of years, and those places are accustomed to receiving that force, that energy, that retribution, and that petition once a year.

Yes, well, because we are in central Chile, which was the part where the Westernization was felt most rapidly, the natives that were there were killed, uprooted or sent far away, and those who stayed were mixed with the recent arrivals, which were the Chilean peasants. The Bailes Chinos either got mixed up in the Catholic question or they disappeared. Who knows what those festivals were like before. That’s one of my dreams; that when I rise, I can chineando [7] on the ridge of Pachacamita, I’ll see from above the entire valley and the Aconcagua river, laters, I’ll transduce and go back in time 600 years, climbing the same ridge chineando with those ancestors 600 years before.

Of course, well, because I assumed that something happened there with those flutes that are played that way, they have to produce something. So I spent a year asking those old men. I went to those festivals, I went to Cai Cai, there I met the Caicainos and they told me, “Yes, one gets drunk, yes, one feels strange…” The perception as one as a human changes in relation to the world. Sound does that and speaking about that is very difficult because there are no words, it’s ineffable to describe that. So one of those old men, Armando, told me, “Alright, dude, stop asking dumb questions and chinea already!” and he gave me a drink, and I chinié, and from that moment I became a Chino-addict.

Of course, and it’s obvious. If you are an anthropologist, like myself, what you do is ethnography, from there to understand the relationship between music and the states of consciousness is absurd.

It would have to be more campestral, a more communitary and solidary logic; that is how Southernlogic must be. As far as sound, well, in sound we learn to distinguish each place’s territorial sound. How many times in history or geography class did the book say, “the mountains are beautiful, the central valley has this and that thing, it has that flora, that geographical feature, those rivers, it has those mountain ranges.” But they have a sound, a specific sound, and that sound has a local meaning. It’s the same as the sound frameworks of the Bailes Chinos. Each Baile Chino belongs to a village. That village has a sound, that dance sounds a certain way and one knows without looking that that dance is from Loncura. There are local frameworks. The sikus are there, the puncullas are there, the tarcas are there, the pifilcas are there, the kultrunes are there, the copla songs are there; there are so many American sounds. [8] All of the Mapuche songs that are precise and full of meaning are there, and there are songs for every moment and situation. I mean, the sound and the voice as vehicles of history, of the presentation of many things that were sung. There is a whole knowledge and density of acoustic information in America.

Absolutely.

It’s absolutely alive. And suddenly I don’t what I’m in and it doesn’t sound and it doesn’t sound and it doesn’t sound and it just doesn’t sound...because something is happening in the relationship, or something is happening to it, or it took a lot of sun, or drank a lot of water, or isn’t comfortable, or has a bit of fluff inside, or a splinter, any weaita [9] and it doesn’t sound. And you go desperate and don’t sound, and that is when you extract other sounds.

It’s alive, it’s much more alive than the Western (flute), that energy that you throw into it returns three-fold. I’ve had my flute for twenty-eight years.

The sound swarm it produces is incredible, a swarm in which one flies, and you leave your body, as if seeing it from above. It’s that collective energy that it produces, the ritual of emotion that is produced, the encounter with friends, drinking wine from the early morning, being happy telling jokes, telling stories, we met each other years ago and we see each other there as old people in different towns. It’s a beautiful thing; the affection for others and the madness of the flutes.