Song for César

…that was when César gave me a beautiful slap:
“Ushunko! What are you doing making two projects when it’s only one?”

My father drove me to school every day. My place was on the right-hand side of his dreams, inside a red car that travelled halfway across Lima to reach Barranco. Everything in that car was neatly arranged; I even remember the stickers. But day after day it was the songs that sounded while he sang them. Huayno greeted me from a very young age, teaching me the freedom of my grandparents, my parents, my whole family as they stamped their feet in a frenzy, remembering Palca, remembering Cusco.

The sound and air of the Andes always surrounded the places where I lived. The stories and anecdotes always carried, and still carry, the aroma of coffee. I am neither a musician nor a coffee grower; but the violin, accordion, tinya, charango and guitar were the stories my parents told me before I went to sleep.

A tree has a sound as it grows, and the hands that work the land often offer songs born from the depths of their own history, their joys, their sorrows, and share them with the universe. That is why I decided to travel through Argentina, Mexico and my own country, searching for those songs, those stories.

In the few months this project has been going, I met a Chamula brother in Chiapas, a brother from Buenos Aires who introduced me to his Catalina, a brother in Jauja who danced with the stars and the demons, and a brother in Cusco who sang to his snow-covered mountain.
My mother always told me, “Listen to the sound of that tree. It is growing. It is talking not only to the other trees, but to you.”

César used to tell me: “Let’s meet soon to work out contributions to your unfathomable journey through the life cycle of the national imagination. We need everyone to keep moving forward with sensitivity and sincerity. I’m very excited about your work; let’s put the interviews and the people we are going to visit down on paper, once and for all! Hurryyy, Ushunko!!!”

“Song for César” is not a tribute, nor a remembrance. It is simply the story of a dear friend who accompanies me. It is simply a song I want to sing to him.

P.S. I intend to finish the project together with César by 2019.

Dear Rudolph,

For six consecutive years I have returned from the same action to the same conviction… today once again, after returning from a pilgrimage alongside thousands upon thousands of peasants and representatives of earthly and cosmic nations, dancers and singers interwoven rhythmically and asymptotically, moving in every direction without ever meeting, at almost 5,000 metres above sea level, for several days at the Q’oyllur Riti festival in Cuzco, I came back to the same point…

Only very recently did I fully understand that my place in life was not to be the devoted pilgrim of absolutely nothing, but a “companion” to pilgrims… this present conviction has accompanied me, like music and poetry, ever since my earliest unconscious memories… on the slopes of Apu Sinakara I experienced a totality of sound that I believe no human ear could register as separate elements: an asyntonic and asynchronous simultaneity, a dense superimposition of sounds that thousands of energetically expressive bodies speak to the whole universe, of their strength beyond the thaw, beyond the impossibility of our survival as a species…

“We are the last men and women of a world already extinct,” their dancing, singing and shouting bodies cry out to me… that world held in its water and its cycles the possibility of articulating everything in the eternal persistence of the death of one cycle giving birth to another, renewed, that will propel us to continue… “in this world we are all already dead”… and yet this stubborn group, structured into nations whose territoriality is rooted in times before the Spanish conquest, is in open war against death, and everyone is an enthusiastic agitator, herald and leading voice…

“Let us save ourselves through music from the illusion of death”… that is the underlying watchword, that vibration which collectively and doggedly drives us to try to renew ourselves so that we may be others, or what we ought to understand as: a new us…

“To touch music with the vibration of the surface line”… there lies your tenacious endeavour, dear Rudolph; photography mediates it, video supports it, brotherly encounter makes it possible, and humble respect propels it beyond any certainty.

To deposit matter onto the plane and withdraw it; to create shadow and light that bear witness to a spirit anterior to the one that finally inhabits that new surface. Could anything be riskier? Perhaps there could, but this new risk of light and shadow, pure and hard, is the dimension of your undertaking. There converge the infinite sounds you perceived, the simultaneous playing of wind and percussion instruments, and of voices, infinite voices saying farewells, farewells… farewells, farewells…

That song for a friend who talked and talked to you, to each and every person willing to listen, takes on meaning in one final act: to move from listening and listening to oneself into speaking…

César has gone; the asyntonic vibration, reverberating in many interwoven and counterwoven selves, survives… if remembered and played again with conviction, it will resound, like a new image carrying the memory of something else, present beyond the mere representation of what it originally was…

“We are all already dead”…

“And yet a secret joy comforts me, and the certainty that another world exists above everyday miseries, and that despite the piercing cold and the pitiless thaw of Apu Sinakara, life flows and will continue to flow, destructive and creative, free and uncontrolled after we have all departed on the journey of no return. Cheers (without thaw).”

The sun is setting. An embrace, dear Uchunko. Your brother Alfredo says goodbye.