Music for Shape-Shifters: Field Recordings from the Amazonian Lowlands, 1981 to 1985 - WAKUENAI (CURRIPACO)

In the early '80s, an anthropologist left his recording equipment and tapes behind in a remote Wakuénai (Curripaco) village along the Upper Río Negro in Venezuela. When he returned almost a year later, he discovered that the village headman and his sons had used the equipment to record 12 hours of tape documenting a bewildering array of local narrative and musical genres -- sacred chants, place-names, spirit languages, and, as featured here, the astonishing and mesmerizing sounds of trumpet and flute ensembles.