Musings on Chicha De La Piedmont,
While Driving Around Georgia’s Actual Piedmont
Russ Bledsoe
When DJ/Producer/Engineer Matt Mansfield, aka Piper Street Sound, approached me to write a piece on his latest LP, Chicha De La Piedmont, it took me a while to think of a way to even go about it. In our years of friendship and collaboration I’ve written reviews of his work before, so I knew of ways to come at it intellectually. But this is the first work I’ve been asked to write about in which I actually shared some real measure of participation. As such, I struggled with how to approach communicating my feelings about the work, without exactly providing a review of the work, lest I be accused of praising my own. Nor did I want my experiences of making parts of it to color my overall experience of the album, something I’m sure most can agree can be difficult. Luckily his approach is so vivid, rooted in so many sounds and rhythms deeply inherent to most of us, that it isn’t hard to allow yourself to become a passenger of this music, to let it carry you on its own journey across continents and waves of time and style.
Recorded this year at Piper Street Studios, Chicha De La Piedmont reflects Mansfield’s ever-evolving love for Afro-Latin music worldwide, and his involvement in the new global movement of DJ’s and producers searching to catalyze cumbia and chicha, as well as AfroLatin and folkloric South American music into a new Digital Age; a spontaneous movement to digitize what initially seems necessarily organic music, not out of reckless progressivism, but in order to lovingly preserve the traditions of all-too-fleeting cultures. Nu-Cumbia, or Cumbia Digital, or Technocumbia, or whatever you want to call it, was started by South American DJ’s who found that calling back to humble roots through the music of the dispossessed, served in electronic form, really connected with listeners more than the more traditional(smirk) electronic forms of Dance/Techno/IDM. Jamaican Dancehall soon dominated, and the spark of genius happened when mash-ups of dancehall beats with samples of Argentine ‘Cumbia Villera’ began to make waves in Buenos Aires. Cut to a few short years later and Cumbia Digital, or other-named electronic forms of Afro-Latin/Caribbean dance music, now has a wider geographical influence than Reggae itself. Take a second and read that last sentence again, and think about how massive that is.
Enter Matt Mansfield, a man with his finger fully on the pulse of emergent themes, an obsessed Dub Producer, an avid devotee of the music of Africa, especially what forms it takes in the Caribbean and Latin America. A man who, with Eye Of Mordor-like intensity, searches out the newest ways of interpreting the old, and assimilates it into his transnational panrhythmic hurricane-scale musical brainmachine that is MattPiperManStreetSoundsfield. When Matt sent me an email with some links to Peruvian Chicha music, and music by Argentine label ZZK’s roster, and told me, “this is about to be huge”, I took notice. We had been collaborating for some time, and I trusted his tastes. Our band, Dialect Trio, was in a fierce writing stage, playing around with Afrobeat, Middle Eastern, and Cuban themes. Immediately we saw a space for this music in what we were doing, and identified in it the synthesis of lo-fi AfroLatin we were looking for. Indeed, some of CDLP contains work begun during that time. So instead of writing a straight-up review of CDLP, I decided to take it on the road for an afternoon’s drive from my sister’s house near Rome, Georgia, down the Appalachian Foothills into Atlanta. What follows are some impressions about CDLP, and Mansfield’s work, that I had on that drive.
- This work is Colorful.
Often, Mansfield’s work can seem hectic. A great example would be 2010’s excellent Cold Hope, an examination of displacement and estrangement. The music is by turns cavernous and claustrophobic. Actually much of the producer’s work is characterized by unpredictability. Elements enter your awareness sometimes epically slowly, only to dissolve the second you get a read on it. In contrast, other elements are often violently jump-cut in and out of the music, in order to create a sense of density, and to force the ear/psyche into appreciating a gestalt that would otherwise take much longer to attain. In terms of color though, a method I use frequently to absorb music though not at all scientific or even favorable as a device in music reviews, his methods of blending can result in a sense of grayness, a jumble of myriad colors that when viewed at a distance comes across as this sort of multi-tonal mélange with maybe one or two over-riding colors appreciable, but unidentifiable when you zoom back into the actual music. Not so here. With this effort, rather than invite you into his dizzying inner landscape, Mansfield’s stated attempt was a synthesis of Andean and other South American folkloric musical styles with those a little closer to home,
such as IDM/Jungle, DirtySouth Hip-hop, and the ever present Dub Reggae with which he made his name; literally a Chicha, de la Piedmont. To that end he paints here with broader strokes. There is much more natural instrumentation, and more of an attempt at capturing whole the feeling of Andean music before chopping it up and adding it to the pot. This then presents identifiable themes which, when taken as a whole, lend a much brighter, more colorful feel to the album. This is what I thought as I rode through the high hills and farmlands of North Georgia under a peerless blue sky and sun-soaked vegetation. I found it very easy, especially early on in the work, to imagine myself riding down out of the highlands of Peru, leaving behind simple villages of smiling peoples, heading towards the lowland cities, into modernity and confusion. This image frequently asserted itself, as we shall see.
- This work is Hopeful.
Perhaps it may be the simplicity of the traditional pentatonic scale used by many cultures referenced here, and the major-themed, upbeat nature of much Andean music that creates a deceptively upbeat, dare I say, happy sound to this album. It’s not pervasive, or static, the mood definitely changes as the album progresses. But, especially early on, I find this to be Mansfield’s lightest, most accessible work to date. It definitely fit with the gorgeousness of the afternoon as I drove along, meandering down through the foothills towards the Piedmont plateau. The title track, while making occasional dips into minor tones, ends up sounding more bittersweet- with a healthy dose of sweet to the bitter- than plaintive, and this, to varying degrees, is true for the rest of the album. It’s a welcome addition to Mansfield’s decidedly dark body of work.
- This work has its own Circadian Rhythm.
As I drove on, ever downward out of the hills and into the suburban sprawl surrounding the megalopolis of Atlanta, so dove the sun behind the horizon, coloring the bright blue of the sky into myriad mutable colors, darkening eventually into the purple-unto-blackness of night held at bay by the sodium lights of the highway. Tonally, I found this echoed in my speakers as Chicha De La Piedmont progressed. More and more, the Andean, folkloric nature of the work began to be subsumed into the peat of Mansfield’s glitchy IDM, Jungle, and Dub. Perhaps it was just my traveling into the increasing urbanity of Atlanta coloring my appreciation of the music, but the tone of the album darkens after the halfway point. Rather than repelling me, though, I found that that early accessibility had me hooked and kept me receptive to the darkening tone. This too differentiates this work from much of the producer’s other material, which can sometimes seem full-on go, right out of the gate, with the end coming in a somewhat jarring fashion. Here, however, I could appreciate more of a shape, a progression from light to dark, and back to light again.
To me, this represents a huge step forward for the auteur’s thematic work. With every release you can appreciably see Mansfield developing a set of tools and refining his processes further and further into a dazzling array of sonic weaponry. Future work from Piper Street Sound is to be eagerly awaited.
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