This work was composed especially for the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos, commissioned by the Transart Festival, with support from the Ernst von Siemens Foundation.
It seeks to explore the rich sonorities and expressive possibilities of the instruments of the Andean highlands: siku, mohoceño, charango, and traditional percussion instruments.
Sawutanaka (“woven textiles” in the Aymara language) is the metaphor from which the musical dynamic of this piece develops. However, it is not an idealised “image,” something static, museumlike, or folkloric, but a moving fabric: dynamic and constanly transformed, emerging from the contradictions and dualisms of Latin American reality (in this case Andean), which have been (and continue to be) a product of violence, cultural mutilation, and the juxtaposition and superimposition of different world views, values, desires and ways of being...
On a formal musical level, there are different textures, timbres, harmonic densities, rhythmic pulsations, and melodic–polyphonic elements that come into play. But there is also something that we might call a “sound dialectic,” which emerges from these elements: between the natural world from which the material physicality of the Andean instruments comes (cane, wood, leather, seeds, hooves) and its cultural organisation; between the relatively chaotic impulses of the natural soundscapes that surround us and the traditional dances, whose structure is wholly human; between the tempered (and hybrid) sounds of the charango and the rich nontempered and multiphonic soundworld of the groups of siku and mohoceño; between the rural–regional identity of contemporary native music and the urban realities in which it survives as a creative act of resistance...; between the traditional and the contemporary.
So these are not just a simple woven sound fabric but a “rebellious sound fabric”. Because despite everything, it continues to exist as a live testimony of its own need for existence.

Alejandro Cardona