Leaping from a twig, a spider lays a strand of silk in the open air. Intuitively, it traces a design, reactive to its environment but guided by something deeper. As it works towards the center, something resembling a home emerges, intricate in its design and inevitably imperfect. The web comes to represent the creature’s creative response to the world and its needs within it. Artmaking and music- making emerge from a similar nerve: through the impulsive drive to create a space for one’s self, crafts perfected over generations and woven into the present moment. Each web has an eye, but its margins are improvised. Zosha Warpeha and Mariel Terán are musicians steeped in craft that dwell in those singular margins.
Orbweaver, their debut collaborative album, is a collection of meditative, improvised duets for Warpeha’s Hardanger d’amore (a fiddle-like instrument emerging from Norwegian folk traditions) and Terán’s indigenous Andean flutes (including the pífano, sikus, and moseño). The two bonded at a residency in 2023 over a mutually sensitive, deconstructivist approach to playing instruments with folkloric origins and a fascination with the unique textures they can produce. Each piece on the album is spacious and tactile with as much focus on the sound of breath against wood and the slow scrape of horsehair on gutstrings as it is on spellbinding harmonic development. This is elemental music, physical music, music that casts off orthodoxy and embraces the leap into open air.
Orbweaver frequently conjures impressionistic imaginings of the natural world. On “Dusted Sparrow / Gorrión,” Warpeha’s ruminative fragments of melody trace scenic landscapes while Terán’s flutes dart avian-like above. “Quesintuu & Umantuu” is named after lake dwelling sirens from Bolivian folklore, Warpeha’s voice drifting out of a heaving yet featherlight drone that hovers and modulates throughout the piece. The pinpricks of pizzicato on the album’s title track are like eight tiny legs tracing warped circles. The mind drifts to the trees that provided the wood which has been hollowed and given resonance, as well as the sheep whose intestines make up the core of the fiddle’s strings and whose claws became the chajchas that rattle in the final minutes of the album.
Though elements of traditional techniques and harmonies can be heard on Orbweaver, the music is driven by intuition and imagination. Warpeha and Terán have both immersed themselves in the cultures and communities that produced their instruments, but they reject the preservationist insistence that for culture to survive it must be suspended in amber. Still, their complex, intimate relationship to heritage-keeping is woven deep into these ambiguous sounds. If tradition accumulates centuries of practice by innumerable participants, the best way to partake in that lineage is to speak as boldly as possible with one’s own voice.
