The cajón contains a radical history. The box-shaped percussion instrument is now commonly used in acoustic setups but it originated in 19th-century Peru as a makeshift means of enslaved people defying Spanish colonial restrictions on music. Workers would put down their wooden crates and begin using them as drums, beating out rhythms and producing dances that have since become part of folk tradition.
For Peruvian artist Ale Hop and percussionist Laura Robles, the cajón’s subversive past has been obscured by its contemporary ubiquity. On their debut album, Agua Dulce, they present nine tracks of electronically processed and deconstructed cajón rhythms, aiming to reconnect a percussive sound with its rebellious roots.
Opener Son de los Diablos sets the tone. Taking its name from a traditional Afro-Peruvian dance, Robles’s electric cajón thunders through fuzzing reverb and gives the original’s skittering rhythm a menacing, industrial charge, supplemented by Hop’s synth bass. The dark atmosphere continues on the slow crawl of another folk dance, Lamento, while the galloping pace of Fuga en Alcatraz pits Robles’s dextrous cajón-playing against an eerie synth tone that rings out for the entirety of the track’s seven minutes.
Each composition treads the line between establishing a stable, danceable groove and its collapse – making for an often unnerving listening experience. The title track fades the cajón rhythm in and out over squeaking electronics like an undulating wave, while Defensoras del Morro builds faster from techno to breakbeat before abruptly ending.
These unpredictable contexts and electrified elements push the cajón into exciting new territory – far from the acoustic folk jam settings it is often found in today. In making its bass tone boom and allowing its higher registers to hiss with reverb, the duo create a modern reimagining of the instrument’s raw power, its heart-thumping tension and physical sense of catharsis.
Also out this month
Danny Mekonnen, saxophonist and ex-member of Ethiopian music group Debo Band, releases his first solo album as Dragonchild (FPE Records). On his beguiling self-titled record, Mekonnen traverses everything from Ethio-jazz to groove-laden funk and Afrobeats, all unified by the clarion call of his horn. MC Yallah returns with her fantastic second album, Yallah Beibe (Hakuna Kulala), pairing machine gun flows with bass-forward, deconstructed club edits. She plays fast and loose with genre, with highlights the screamo-influenced No One Seems to Bother and the dancehall euphoria of Big Bung. Producer Alex Figueira’s debut album Mentallogenic (Music With Soul) might prove to be a crate digger’s delight, trading heavily on dancefloor cumbia rhythms but with a raw, lo-fi recorded feel perfect for sound system atmospherics.
