Musica Escondida / rOaxakin Coast
We just returned from a few weeks on the coast of Oaxaca … Puerto Escondido and vicinity … goal : R+ R and surf recreation .. to relax and re-create ourselves …repair and gather our QI .. post-festival, and pre-academic year…
My vitality always rekindles around the sea / surfing .. and what a location to enjoy same …. regular scenic sessions at Carizalillo to all-in Zicatela …
Hot, sweaty, surfy, double rainbow morning, lighting storms, amorous sea turtles …. lush daily mercados, and eating with gusto and hoping for the best …
The streets are lively almost all day and night with itinerant sounds of knife sharpeners, Gas de Oaxaca delivery trucks and octopus mongers… Plenty Dub vibz in Zicatela at Casa Babylon( hand adorned by the same artist as Sierra Nevada World Music Festival), live Bugalu and son at Club Congo in the Adoqin.
Some of the best music hits were issuing from odd and assorted places … paint stores and dusty-rusty VW beetles .. wafting at great distances through humid night skies …interrupting sleep and urging whirligig walks … to find live events and large ensembles in the Municipal Plaza for, among other celebrations, Taxi Driver Appreciation Day … all kinds of tropical and Mexican Trad / POP … and SKY satellite … in itself presenting disquieting intrusive paradoxes of beamed-in images and sounds, in otherwise and decreasingly unlikely palapa’d places.
After several days of enjoying the varied tropicalismo we were listening to each day via local indie radio, we visited in studio at Radio Esmeralda 94.1 in Bacocho. The staff greeted us warmly, and we took several pictures together under their Marlin-wearing-sunglasses-and-headphones logo .. I have proposed a musical and cultural exchange .. lets see what develops …
My compañeros assured me that I should bring a recorder next trip, and they will introduce me, to coax/invite local Zapotec and Mixtec men to produce the variety of entertaining and bizarre sounds, whistles, and peals they create with hands and leaves, instead of beat boxing … will do !
Arrived home with a list of music diggs scribbled in my little spiral notebook :
Jota Quest, Mariachi Mexico ( which led me to Jorge Negrete), Inspector, Lulu Santos, house artist Dennis Ferrer, New Age Artists Dean Eversen with Xian Ting, and even a dance floor thriller by the ubiquitous Shakira.
Stacked up and for radio mixes is a pickup truck o US of A country singles (Holler Back)/ The Lost Trailers) , and selections from heavyweight Roots’ / How I Got Over … spent the morning listening to a whole lotta Sheryl Crow, and Bob Marley’s last concert is on deck … with a big Bud attached, as a summer vacation gift from a neighbor … positive vibration, ye-ah !
Have you journeyed this summer ? what soundscapes might you have you taken in ?
= : ) ~
