Images courtesy of Youth Experimental Studio, photos by Juan Pablo Aragón.
Peruvian artists and designers at the Youth Experimental Studio have created a 9 disc box-set for musician Manongo Mujica, which looks like the hidden treasure of a mythic Inca Temple. The Peruvian classical composer and percussionist got his start in London during the 60s learning rock and free improvisation. With his return home to Peru in 1973, he began a personal quest to undercover autochthonous musical traditions including music Afro-Peruvian music, and music from the jungle and the Andes region. Sonidos de la Huaca (Sounds from the Huaca) is a recompilation of the last 20 years of Mujica’s work including experimental improvisations and explorations of ritualistic music that have gone unpublished until now.
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Youth Experimental Studio has decorated each CD in the musician's compilation with a beautiful abstract granite-marble design, and encapsulated the set inside a smooth wooden box. The Director of Youth Experimental Studio, Jonathan Castro, elaborates on the idea behind the box’s aesthetic: “The huaca soundscape is meant to be an invitation to discover a sort of secret music in the same way someone would find a buried treasure chest," he tells The Creators Project.Huacas are pre-hispanic ceremonial worship centers, monuments or natural locations such as immense rocks, that are found in all regions of Peru. “The desert and the huacas constitute the essence of his personal aesthetic since it refers to vestiges, ruins of a millenary past," he explains. "Using music, Manongo is able to recover and imagine a millenary sound.”Castro concludes, "That is why we worked on every disc as if it was a kind of archeological musical object in which we can discover the extra material consisting of pictures of rocks, nature and ancient architecture which associates the music with the images forming a musical landscape.”
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