Arianna Casellas y Kauê - Suenan Las Campanas - 1LP

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What does urgency sound like? The grinding of teeth, the drumming of fingers, a scream directly from the diaphragm? If it concerns the collective, a multitude required to come together, a greater alarm is required: the ringing of the bells – in Spanish, Suenan las campanas, as Arianna Casellas and Kauê Gindri title their first album.

To apply this sense of urgency to music is not to trivialise it: it is to recognise its intrinsic sound. The bells are sometimes literal (as heard in the title track, which Arianna playfully describes as a “giant mass of percussion that shall swallow up whoever’s listening”), sometimes conjured in onomatopoeias (as happens in “Nada Pes”). “That urgency stems from a strength within ourselves, which we need to get across”, Kauê says. Anyone who has witnessed Arianna Casellas y Kauê in concert will know that to be true: a story time pushed to its limit, the fables of tradition stripped to the bone, spilling into an unpredictable daily life.

In their first album under their own names (they also work together in the Montes project, in a parallel plane of existence), Arianna and Kauê don’t tame their instincts. They don’t sweeten neither the vocal arrangements nor their approach to playing, from the cuatro fingerpicking to the polyrhythms on the quitiplás (an instrument native to the northern coast of Venezuela, made of bamboo sticks). If orality remains the driving force of their work, however, that does not mean it cannot be reevaluated. Suenan las campanas targets “fake memories”: the myths handed down from one generation to the next, pertaining to “how we are in the world and in the heart of each person. I speak for myself”, Arianna clarifies, “but what applies to me applies to everyone alike.”

“Lanza” turns this reflection into an outpouring: what fiction dilutes the truth in those inherited stories, in order “to maintain the fantasy of life, fabricating what you may call tradition”? This same question permeates the nostalgia central to “Mil Años, Madre”, a redeeming memory that’s also grown muddled overtime. Suenan las campanas shakes off the gilded dogmas of tradition, and counterfeit folklore. “Our songs always spring from what we have inside us. They are never planned in order to embody a certain genre or rhythm, or to grab what’s most recognisable and picturesque.” Descriptors which would be incompatible with the true nature of this record: spontaneous, tactile and vertiginous.

1. Nada Pes

2. Campanas

3. Passear

4. Casa é Dentro

5. Sabana Grande

6. Lanza

7. Abuelo

8. Mil Anos Madre

9. Fim da Tarde