Second release in Buh's "Sounds Essentials Collection," documenting the history of Experimental Music in Peru. Miguel Flores is, alongside musicians such as Arturo Ruiz del Pozo, Luis David Aguilar or Manongo Mujica, one of the most important representatives of that period that spans from mid 70s to mid 80s, when experimenting musically in Peru united modern composing techniques of avant garde music and the search of the sounds of mother land.
 Miguel Flores’ Primitivo is as mind-blowing as they come. Recorded in 1981,  Buh’s issue is its first proper release. Flores belongs to the same generation as Arturo Ruiz del Pozo, attacking many of the same cultural concerns - Peru’s sonic identity, from the other end of the spectrum. Where Pozo came from a conservatory background, Flores spent the 60’s and 70’s playing Rock and Peruvian folk music, eventually  evolving toward more avant-garde gestures and concerns. These influences ripple through Primitivo. The work was instigated by choreographer Luciana Proaño as a score for her performance Miros y Muyeres. Each track holds a reasonably independent approach, seemingly adapted to the demands of a dance lost to memory. The album begins somewhere between electronic research and a loose psychedelic jam, before a headfirst fall into traditional Peruvian and Spanish melodies and instrumentation. It’s brilliant and incredibly engaging dichotomy. As the work evolves, it becomes harder to define – at points flirting with outright experimentation, moving between atonality, gestures familiar in Free-Jazz, pure ambience, and drifting passages which recall New Age music. It’s structures and sonorities push era and association away, creating a timeless body of work.  Primitivo offers clear a window into the concerns of a neglected generation of Peruvian composers, and a lost moment in sound. Filled with politic, the singular voice of a culture, and creative brilliance, this is a record to form a more accurate vision of history, broadening our understanding of global discourses with experimental music during the 70’s and 80’s, and thus the origins of contemporary practices which might otherwise be obscure. Like Pozo’s Composiciones Nativas, this LP is a revelation and as essential as it comes. Not to be missed on any count.

"the lost Latin-American version of Angus MacLise's Psychedelic Batteries, the proto-Industrialisms of Z'ev," Mimaroglu