A Body Like a Home
Following acclaimed collaborations with Laura Robles (Agua Dulce) and Titi Bakorta (Mapambazuko), Peruvian experimentalist Alejandra Cárdenas—also known as Ale Hop—presents her lastest album, “A Body Like a Home”. The project is a sonic memoir where songs and poems map the fraught terrains of trauma, recovery, and love. At the heart of the album is Cárdenas’s voice—part witness, part confessor—over layers of electric guitar, electronic textures, and evocative field recordings; channelling years of turbulence—intergenerational scars left by colonialism, racism, domestic violence, and alcoholism—into a work that oscillates between brutality and tenderness.
To amplify the album’s emotional gravity to the stage, Cárdenas will debut the material playing live for the first time in atrio formation, with Biliana Voutchkova on the violin, and Ignacio Briceño on the guitar.
Alejandra Cárdenas is a Peruvian-born artist. Cárdenas began her career in Lima’s underground music scene in the 2000s. Her work encompasses various formats such as live shows, albums, multimedia artworks and research. Her live performances, under the moniker Ale Hop, merge the physical qualities of sound with raw affective states. She builds layers of sound by maneuvering an intricate repertoire of electric guitar techniques to create music of deep intensity. In the past year, she has initiated various collaborative practices, including Agua Dulce with percussionist Laura Robles, radically mutating Afro-Peruvian rhythms, and Near and Remote Activation Practices, with sound artist Tatiana Heuman, which draws inspiration from South American organology and storytelling.
Performance: October 17, 8 pm / Flutgraben – Mehrzweckhalle
Photo: Ale Hop, photo by Raul García Pereira