The Montevideo-based Salviatek collective is not one for resting on its laurels when it comes to pursuing unheard sounds. Co-founders Pobvio and Lechuga Zafiro are known for their wildly innovative edits that combine the electronic and acoustic, the contemporary and the traditional — sometimes even building their own instruments to hit the notes they need.
Perhaps it is this drive that compelled them to remix Lechuga’s 2015 debut EP Aequs Nyama. Salviatek tapped forward-thinking producers from across the world, like Discwoman’s DJ Haram and South Africa’s DJ Lag, to rework the original’s tracks, which were already a hybrid of indigenous sound traditions and dark club veneers.
Pobvio tells us that his contribution, an edit of Lechuga’s “Tambor Espada,” can be divided into two auditory moments. The first is the song’s introduction, an homage to the Charrúa, Pobvio’s ancestors – a people who once ruled the land now known as Uruguay. Within this first sequence, one finds notes from the siku (a South American panpipe), and tambores traditionally associated with the pampas, or lowlands, woven together by Pobvio to share tonal similarities with the music of the Chaco province in northern Argentina. The producer says the second moment was produced with C1080 candombe percussion, combined with an “old machine that generates large quantities of electric current, like a mini ray that recalls the infra sounds of bats, which are a sacred animal in the Charrúa worldview,” he tells Remezcla.
The Aequs Nyama remix EP is set to drop in its entirety on February 9, and has already leaked a head-spinning, limb-thrashing “Suave Pero Rugoso” edit from Tayhana.
Stream our premiere of “Tambor Espada” above.