Apparently there is a fair amount of hype around Puerto Rican electric plena quartet Chuwi, and it stems in part from their inclusion on a Bad Bunny track last year. I haven't heard it. Probably won't either.* I know about Chuwi because I Shazam'd one of their songs while waiting for a sandwich at a Cuban restaurant. I'm an organic music forager, it's true. Chuwi's second EP,
Tierra, has a noticeably breezier quality to it compared to their first EP,
Pan, released two years prior, with its haunted scans of dizzy disquiet and uneven sense of crawling across a steadily eroding incline. This more recent EP instead draws forward the more outwardly tropical aspects of their sound, diverting it through riven veins of pooling electronic diffusion, like channels cut in the sand allowing fresh water to flow inland where it can replenish parched lips and cleanse calloused hands. The teetering sway and lapping melodies could easily be mistaken for a resort accompaniment at times; its accommodating abundance and ebullient affection for its subject matter are certainly pliant enough to appear insouciant at a brush and even offer overhangs of respite for tourists. But
Tierra at bedrock is a carta de amor and homenaje to the group's home, a land in unsettling limbo- swallowed whole, chewed up, and regurgitated back in place in an increasingly unrecognizable form by the cold logic of commerce, the callow capitulation of corruption, and a naturalization of neglect, the compounding conditions of colonialism which, together, conspire, among other insults, to perpetuate a vampiric attrition and wringing out of the island's lifeblood: its people. What is a land without its people? At best a desert, at worst an empty crypt. Balmy as it is sonically,
Tierra is an echo of the unheard, one that manages, at times, to land sweetly on the ears, but which smuggles into the open the indisputable certitude of a sour state of affairs.
*You really have to drag me like I'm a mule over a mountaintop to get me to listen to anyone big enough to play the Super Bowl (an unfortunately annual exhibition of the crassest excesses of commercialism and a monument to human sacrifice and wasted potential). That said, I don't have a negative impression of Bad Bunny himself, and I think he has a nice mustache, but the vibe I get from the obsessive celebrity cult around him is that his stuff is probably not for me. Who knows, I could be wrong... First time for everything.
