Tàr

Today one of the top-rated, most highly awarded and celebrated films of the year, ‘Tàr’, directed by Todd Fields and starring Cate Blanchett, is premiered in many cinemas worldwide including the UK! The full release is this Friday.

I Was The Film’s Official Field Recordist for the moment of ceremonial folk song which luminously, potently, (unexpectedly), sets the tone during the first three minutes of the film’s opening credits. It’s a day for pride. Do go and watch it, and check the recording, it’s out of this world ⚛️🙌🎤🎧

Stephen Griffiths IMDB @plumsound, my uncle, is the chief sound editor, and has received multiple award nominations for his work.

https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0341756/

Finding the source, organising and finalising the recording of this piece of songcraft was an immense project that has surely made an important mark on both our careers!

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The song is an icaro, a ceremonial medicine chant from the esteemed Shipibo-Conibo master healer, Mama Elisa AKA Reshin Wesna Elisa Vargas Fernandez, recorded at the Sanken Nete healing centre Sanken NETE near Pucallpa in the Peruvian Amazon.

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Naturally, it’s been quite some time i’ve been very excited to make this announcement!

It comes with a story, a grand one I still can’t quite believe, and am very grateful, that I’ve lived and am now able to tell. I’ve written some of it below blog-style. Hence the great length of this post!

Voila the links to the recording, enjoy! To be listened to with presence:

https://youtu.be/JBHph4tSr-I

https://open.spotify.com/track/567KZcOolg7k31wQmUAzPU...

‘Cura Mente’ (healing the mind) by Elisa Vargas Fernandez is released on all major platforms via the official film score album. Produced by Deutsche Gramaphone at Abbey Road Studios.☝️🎼🎼

In the images:

- First selection from a series of portrait photos that I took of Mama Elisa and her grandson during a special shoot with a camera I hired (thanks to Henry Ventura Quesada) I’m delighted to present.

- The film score album cover

- The Sanken Nete Healing centre website: www.sanken-nete.org

- Wikipedia’s credits list, I’ve been credited as one of the producers! 🙌🎧 On the YouTube song release I’m credited as Producer, Studio and Sound Engineer (to be fair.. I organised plenty but was a recordist more than anything, it gives me a taste for one day being producer for real though!)

- An invitation to the official UK premiere viewing.

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First and foremost, the icaro itself, and it’s source, deserve due credit.

My upmost respects and a great deal of appreciation to Mama Elisa Vargas Fernandez of the Sanken Nete retreat centre of Pucallpa, Peru. To her son and fellow master healer Maestro Fredy Luis Sanchez Vargas. To the rest of the inspirational family I came to know and feel much kinship with. To her people, the Shipibo-Conibo, home to the Amazonias. To the powerful and transformational traditions of healing and medicine, that she is passing on out to the world, as she continues to work as a representative and guardian of her ancestral line and prestigious heritage.

Alongside her family, Maestra Elisa has supported and guided me through immense growth and inner work, as well as giving me and the production team the permission to record her highly sanctified medicine songs for the use in a major international film. I am truly grateful, always will be, and intend to continue to work with her and be of support in future.

I was entrusted with recording many more icaros in ceremony in my 5 or so weeks at Sanken Nete, watch this space for what I’ll be creating with this collaboration, in the spirit of intercultural creative exchange, the practices of ethnomusicology, studies on the decolonisation of mind and culture, and healing customs come together. 👀✍🏼⚡️⚡️

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Icaros are sacred songcraft, sung by master healers of the Amazonian indigenous lineage in ceremonial context, for the purpose of conducting spiritual healing, protection, ‘surgery’. They’re known for being the principle ‘tool’ and medium, alongside the master plant ayahuasca and other medicines and practices, through which deep healing work takes place in myriad forms.

They are often stunningly beautiful. When listened to within the context they’re crafted for, respected and comprehended, few forms of song seem so astoundingly affective, I know many would agree. Mama Elisa’s Icaros are renowned for their particular beauty and potency. Those of her son Maestro Fredy, and late son-in-law Maestro Darwin Louis Marin also.

(I met the family in the aftermath of Darwin’s untimely passing away, and formed a friendship with his 11 year old son, a maestro-to-be in early training. This is still a raw and hard time for the family on many fronts and I hope the influence of the film is supportive to them).

Icaros are sung in ceremony, often in the pitch dark, when all light feels as if it could be lost as the affects of the plants grip you..

I felt hit by tangible waves of sound and indescribable force, lifted and guided and my innermost experiences immediately, uncannily responded to. I was filled and surrounded by whole worlds of illumination, colour, pattern and intensely vivid and directly transformative vision and experience, profoundly cared for and protected. My perspectives on the capacities and essence of life itself were shaken and evolved to their very core. Nothing less than these heights of experience and transmutation were facilitated by this form of singing. I could write many more pages.

It’s awe -inspiring to me, that an Icaro which contributed to indescribably life-changing experiences of mine and many others, which I conducted the recording of, which represents such a proud yet elusive ancestral legacy (one which recently suffered at the hands of particularly brutal colonisation, the story barely known) is going out to touch the lives of many millions in such a major and successful film. 🙌🙌🙌🎼

It must be mentioned that the high-profile commercialisation of an indigenous culture’s deeply sacred tradition, art, spiritual property, is a very delicate matter involving the necessity for profound cultural and indeed spiritual respect, sensitivity, awareness and capacity for communication and agreement. This side of proceedings has been quite a process to say the least.

I’ve been impressed of the director Todd Fields’ approach, honouring and tentative since the beginning from my experience of his interactions. I very much hope that the promotion of the Icaro of Elisa’s ‘Cura Mente’ through the film and it’s accompanying screenplay album out on all major platforms and on discs and vinyl, as well as her highlighted accreditation in the film, leads to many benefits for her centre and her family. They deserve the very best, much recognition and respect, and ideally bountiful new arrivals.

Beyond this, it could be said that the culture merits it’s influence on the world, and its dignified preservation. The work now, it could be said, is to maintain integrity, justice, decolonial transgressions, and spiritual authenticity home to the true heritage itself, as the story unfolds. I hope that this work is done justly, and have been attempting to play my role where I can, and will continue to.

I arrived at Sanken Nete myself with much preparedness to cultivate a trusting relationship, one which made it clear that the essence of the tradition was comprehended and honoured, the purpose of the project clearly communicated, the rights of all involved well-protected. With my mid-level Spanish of the time and no translator, I hope I did well in this regard considering my efforts.

Credits and many thanks must of course be given to SOAS University of London and all my professors for the many teachings and inspirations that enabled me to succeed in this project.

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Here follows more storyline for you!

How on earth did I find myself implicated in such a professional and adventurous mission, you may ask.

The credit goes to my uncle, the distinguished multi-award-winning chief sound editor of the film, for which he’s also been nominated more awards, Stephen Griffiths. I’m beyond grateful.

When he learned, in January last year, that I was soon to travel to South America on a 6 months trip, he pondered a while before suddenly making a surreptitious proposition that I assist him on a film project he was beginning to work on. An original recording was needed. I’d recently graduated from an ethnomusicology degree, have some experience in recording and a lot in music, it made sense that it was me given the task at hand.

It was a radical initial idea, that at first would have only a small role to play in the film if it was possible at all. It involved travelling to a remote area of the Amazon, finding a curandero traditional healer, of an indigenous group I knew nothing of other than through a chance mention in the book I’d been reading, and organise to make a professional quality recording of a song usually only sung within the heights of ceremony. The next day I visited, I got a drill sergeant-esque briefing in the studio and was trusted with a couple of field recorders, one of them quite ancient, the heartwarming reassurance that his career might be on the line if I messed things up, a good solid pat on the back, and I was off to meet the wizards.

After two spectacularly lively months in Columbia, getting the music and dancing and beaches and so on out the way before such a serious project, and waiting on the thumbs-up from HQ, I made my way to the Amazon rainforest.

From Laeticia at the furthermost Southern Eastern corner of Columbia, I spent three days and nights on a boat sailing up the unforgettable might of the Amazon river. For two weeks I lived and worked in an off-grid medicine community in deep jungle somewhere near Iquitos, Aroiris Iquitos. There are hundreds more stories I’ll have to put out there sometime soon, or at least save properly for my grandkids. Many more thank yous to make also. For two more weeks I followed trails of links and contacts and heresay to try to meet and organise a recording with a shipibo healer of my own finding.

Several potentials fell through despite all my efforts, another was very close to being arranged via an amazing Polish recordist and ethnomusicologist @JuJu Sounds, I was put in touch with by his sister @Marta Uzume that I had the good fortune of staying with a while near the town of Nauta. By then, however, Todd had found a good sounding contact he and the team wanted me to investigate, and I got on a plane from Iquitos to Pucallpa, the jungle city at the centre of Shipibo territory, to go to meet this renowned healer in person..

Documents and legal shenanigans. Lawyerful interventions. Pain. I waited in Pucallpa city for more than a week and a half until the legal documents I would need to get signed, all 48 of them (three copies, two languages), were prepared and sent through, and lawyers fussed and worried and made refusals. I de-jungled all my kit, ate barbecued fish on street tables amongst families, busked and organised little gigs, made friends, twiddled my thumbs, loyally stuck to my phone for updates, did research and prepared myself. The lawyers were eventually juggled and averted and out-shenaniganed so that we could continue (jest aside, the assurance and legal framework they created for all parties involved of course made everything possible and they must be appreciated).

After an afternoon of much agitation for Stephen arranging a call with me and the director on the one day I decided to keep my phone off till late morning (turned phone on to 20 missed calls), I had a last briefing with Todd Fields himself over the phone, and finally I got the all clear to speak with Maestra Elisa and her son José Rawa Sanchez Vargas in a call, with a (another) lawyer from Lima kindly involving himself. As soon as we heard each other’s voices, Elisa and I, we were all warm chuckles and much resonance. We arranged my visit, and I was up soon after dawn the next day to make the dusty journey to San Francisco further to the North for the first of many extraordinary visits to Sanken Nete over the following month.

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You’ll have to push me to write more of the story! Let me know if you want chapter 2 and you might convince me 😉

For now, this will do as an announcement post for this successful work, and a promotion for the real honourable creators who absolutely should not be forgotten in the afterglow of all of Tàr’s success: Mama Elisa, Reshin Wesna, her family and Sanken Nete, and the real life Shipibo-Conibo people and their culture above and beyond any easily dramatised aesthetics and so forth.

Please like and follow their pages, find out more about them, and know that they are there and waiting open-armed if you feel you have a story and a work to live in the Amazon of Peru yourself.

With much gratitude.