Friday, 18 April, 2025 - 20:00
Laura Robles and Pidgins: Refrains of the Day
Door 20:00 / Concerts 20:30 / Tickets ( only at door ) 10 - 15 euro
Laura Robles (cajón, batás, congas, electric bass) was born in 1981 in Swaziland, Africa, and grew up in Lima. At the age of four, she gained access to the rich Afro-Peruvian musical tradition through lessons with master Amador "Chebo" Ballumbrosio, before being taken under the wing of Juan Medrano "Cotito," internationally renowned for his work with Susana Baca. For ten years now, Laura has been considered one of the most important players of the cajón in Peru, the central instrument of folklore that emerged under the influence of West African slaves. At 13, she was accepted into Susana Baca's "Instituto Negro Continuo," where she intensively studied Cuban folklore and popular music, as well as the complex music of Yoruba culture. She declined a scholarship offer from Berklee College, Boston, to devote herself to her own music.
She founded the successful bands "Astrocombo" and "Stretch it to The Limit," as well as the social-educational initiative "Parió Paula," and has performed with theater and dance companies and some of Peru's most renowned folk, jazz, and rock musicians - in Peru and at international festivals in Central and South America, the USA, and Spain, among others.
Pidgins is an experiment in percussive languages. The Mexico City duo improvise complex rhythm matrices by phasing metric, melodic, and rhetorical phrases. These pattern systems form the grammar Pidgins use to construct linguistic puzzles—from productivity mantras to guided de-meditations. Pidgins' rhythm and chant work invokes the oral and rhythmic methods of traditional trance rituals in order to interrogate contemporary trance states—managerial class dogmas, self-help literature, and new age therapies.
Percussionist Milo Tamez's drumming is informed by a decades-long study of polyrhythm. Tamez flows between minimal percussion and extended drum set, employing melo-rhythmic percussive textures within multidimensional patterns. Vocalist and electroacoustician Aaron With's finger percussion electronics mix just intonations, historical instruments, and field recordings. His synthetically processed vocal chants of technocratic jargon mantras interacts provocatively with the duo's ritualistic percussive energy. The Quietus described the tension: "the intensity and depth of Pidgins’ playing breathes new life into dead cliches, triggering an excess of meaning where meaning seems to have all but disappeared."
www.pidginsmusic.com
milotamez.net
aaronwith.com
https://www.pidginsmusic.com milotamez.net aaronwith.com https://lauraroblesmusic.com
