EGUNGUN: PERCUSSION SEXTETS BY LOUIS FRANZ AGUIRRE

SoXXI PERCUSSION GROUP

1. Egungun: Ará Orun (2006-2007) 10:37 


2. Toque a Eggun (2008) 3:37

3. Bembé (2008) 11:06

4. Oriki y Bembé a Eshu (Kyrie eleison) (2022) 26:08


5. Wemilere a Eleggua y Oggún (Liturgia de la Presencia Divina) (2019-2021) 15:20

EGUNGUN features the Valencia-based SoXXI Percussion Group and their decade-spanning collaboration with Louis Franz Aguirre (b. 1968), one of the foremost Latin American composers of today.

The album consists of First Recordings of Aguirre’s groundbreaking percussion sextets, a singular body of work which conjures up the composer’s mystical-religious universe. Elements from traditional Afro-Cuban percussion music, Indian classical music and Iannis Xenakis’s percussion writing are some of the sources that Aguirre draws upon, yet his musical language is wholly original.

Visceral and highly dramatic, the five compositions on EGUNGUN encompass every conceivable dynamic nuance, from evocative gongs and incantations of ancient Yoruba texts to terrifying textures, screams, and a profusion of drums and unconventional metallic percussion sounds, including the unheard-of and stunningly captured sound of electric hammer drills drilling into car rims!

EGUNGUN is the follow-up to Ekkozone’s latest release, ORULA, which was picked as one of the best albums of 2023 by the leading Danish music magazine Seismograf.

PERFORMERS

Percussion: Borja Donet, Andreu Queralt, Miguel Ángel Real, Sergi Dauder, Josep Furió, and Joan Soriano

CREDITS

Producer: Joan Soriano / Associació Cultural Apart
Co-producer and executive producer: Mathias Reumert

Recording, editing, mix: Pau Chafer, Damián Aragó, and Joan Soriano
Mastering: Sebastian Vinther Olsen
Cover: Morten Adam Agergaard
Group photo by Alicia Arnau Aparicio
Portraits by Toni Sasal Abad
Portrait of Louis Franz Aguirre: Maria Yaborska
Program notes: Joan Soriano (English translation by Mathias Reumert)
Music publisher: Igbodú Edition

Recorded 2022-2023 in Canals, Valencia at the RC-Records studio and the Associació Cultural Apart studio
Special thanks to Carlos Peón Casas, Iván César Morales, and Fran Hopenwasser

RELEASE DETAILS

Released March 2024
Cat No.: ekkozone02
EAN 809730000225