How Latin American Electronic Artists Are Using Field Recordings to Reconnect With Nature

In the face of a severe climate crisis, musicians from Argentina to Mexico are increasingly weaving the sounds of birds, streams, and forests into their work.
Argentinian electronic artist Uji during one of his field recording trips in Latin America
Argentinian producer Uji during one of his field recording trips in Latin America. Photo by Carlos Rivero. Image by Drew Litowitz.

A man perches on a rock, holding a small microphone over a roaring river, water tumbling over boulders, flanked by lush jungle and hanging vines. The Andes Mountains rise up on all sides around him, crumpled-paper ridges shrouded in gauzy clouds. He stretches his arm out—gripping tightly, listening intently. The river will reappear, months later, in an entirely different place: flowing out of speakers or headphones in dense cities, woven into electronic music.

Throughout Latin America, producers are increasingly taking to the mountains, plains, streams, and forests, armed with microphones and a contemporary vision of how music can connect to the landscape around them. They target birdsong, insect calls, rainfall, and the flow of water, transforming the sounds to create rhythms, melodies, or textured backdrops. Sometimes the field recordings are imported directly into a track, sometimes edited beyond recognition—slowed, reversed, or stretched. The results are both familiar and strange, and as diverse as the sounds themselves.

Argentinian producer Agustín Rivaldo, aka Barrio Lindo, is one of the artists looking to nature to shape his music. On tracks like “Saudade,” he turns the sound of a river’s flow into a shaker or a hi-hat. “It adds spatiality to digital sounds, creating an imaginary scene for the song,” he says.

In the face of a global climate crisis, as well as a severe regional one, with alarming levels of deforestation in the Amazon, along with megaprojects and fracking incursions, the desire to commune with these landscapes is more acute than ever. “There’s a sense of urgency to connect with organic sounds and recognize that we are part of this natural world,” says Pedro Canale, who records as Chancha via Circuito. Softly spoken through his Argentinian accent, he notes that the nocturnal frog calls on his track “Coroico” were recorded in a forest high in the Bolivian Andes. He eventually textured them over the song to give it a somnambulant quality, drawing the listener deep into the woods and into the night.

Ambient sound is nothing new to electronic music. For decades, artists have mixed the sounds of their environments into their work, conjuring place as context. From techno originators’ the Belleville Three echoing the city of life of industrial Detroit in their beats to Paul Kalkbrenner’s track based on the “doors closing” bleeps of Berlin’s S-Bahn railway, ambient sound can provide scenery, or even make us newly conscious of the musical nature of the seemingly banal sounds we come across in our everyday lives.

But there’s something different happening in Latin America right now: The urge to infuse digital music with organic sound is made more urgent by the rapid disappearance of entire ecosystems, and by atomized urban living—a reality that has become even harder to escape during pandemic lockdowns.

Some producers consider this rooting into the land as a way of producing something culturally authentic. Veteran Argentinian artist Luis Maurette, aka Uji, had a nomadic childhood, absorbing culture all over Latin America. He then went to study music in the U.S., but soon began to feel dissociated from his own music there. “My music had become alienating—too abstract,” he says. “I needed it to come back to my own roots—electronic music which was connected to the earth. I spent years travelling all over Latin America with a mic and I have hours and hours of field recordings. They’re the scenery for the song and they’re as important as the melody.”

Mati Zundel, aka Lagartijeando, is an Argentinian producer who grew up on the plains outside Buenos Aires. “I wanted my music to come from where I come from: It’s not English drum and bass, it’s not German techno, it’s what we do, and we do it better than everyone,” he says.

Many of these artists started out by mixing traditional Latin American rhythms with modern electronic touches in a style dubbed digital cumbia, nodding to the folkloric Colombian dance music that spread across the continent in the 1940s. The cumbia beat itself has mixed origins, birthed on the coast of Colombia from Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and Spanish traditions.

The digital cumbia scene was incubated a decade ago in Buenos Aires at a club night called Zizek—an homage to Slovenian philosopher and cult hero Slavoj Žižek. Though the reference may seem obscure for a dance party, Žižek’s irreverent combination of philosophy with everything from pop culture to architecture (most notoriously pointing out the political ideologies demonstrated by the varying shapes of toilets) perfectly paralleled the artful playfulness happening in Latin American electronic music at the time. The night exploded into global parties, a record label, and a community of artists whose experiments with blending unlikely sounds and styles have continued ever since.

A few years ago, many producers began to move away from digital cumbia, stepping off the dancefloor while still maintaining a philosophy of combining old and new. The downtempo music that emerged is rich with strange sounds and rare rhythms, some buoyant and melodic, others thumping and hypnotic. This music’s liberation from the demands of the club has given it a new relevance during the pandemic, with many of us looking for sounds that are more bucolic than danceable—music to conjure the Amazon to our apartments, or airdrop us onto the top of an Andean ridge, many miles from our now-far-too-familiar walls.

Lagartijeando. Photo courtesy of the artist.

It has been labeled eléctrica selvática—“rainforest electro”—but the music is as varied as Latin America itself, from light and dreamy, evocative of a hillside sunrise, through to dark and nocturnal, deep in the desert. With the Andes Mountains as its spine, the Amazon Rainforest as its heart, and the wilds of Patagonia at its feet, the landscapes and wildlife of the continent are the most varied of any on the planet, and their presence in its music is age-old.

Shika Shika, a label founded by Rivaldo and British producer (and former Greenpeace activist) Robin Perkins, aka El Búho, is a rising force in this movement, releasing several anthology albums of environmentally inspired electronic music. And Perkins’ dreamily oceanic recent EP Aguas Profundas was almost entirely created from recordings of the sea—bubbles, waves, even submarines—some transformed beyond recognition with reverb, pitch-alteration, and delay. “You forget what was digital and what was organic, and that’s beautiful in itself,” Perkins tells me animatedly, during a break from a late-night production session.

For others, the call of a single bird can form the gravitational center of a whole song. The mirla colombiana was that bird for Simón Mejía, founder of the celebrated Colombian group Bomba Estéreo who also records solo work as Monte. In 2020, Mejía moved out of Bogotá and into the countryside, and was struck by the chorus of birds that woke him every morning. One call stood out—a mirla that sang from a tree by his home. He started recording it. “We developed a closeness—some strange bond,” he says. “I think he sang more beautifully knowing I was recording.”

One day, he found the mirla on the ground outside his house, lifeless. Mejía gave the bird a small burial and began weaving his recordings with a charanga beat. “The melody of the song is an homage to him, the voice of the song is his voice.” Measured and rhythmic, Mejía speaks with a near-infectious calm, but is palpably enthused by his field recordings, perfectly able to mimic the sound of the mirla in a whistle, with the chorus of the Bogotá countryside always ringing in the background behind him.

His album Mirla is a bright kaleidoscope of highly synthetic and natural sounds, often combined or altered into ambiguity: crickets which could be electronic bleeps, and synths which could almost be nocturnal hoots. “Nature has its own music, rhythms, melody, language, and the question is how to turn those textures and sounds into my personal language of electronic music,” Mejía says.

With his solo project, Mejía incorporates field recordings from all over Colombia, from the wetlands of the River Magdalena to the deep Amazon Rainforest. The country’s Pacific forest is the latest ecosystem to capture his attention—a dense jungle of more than 500,000 hectares, it’s one of the most humid and biodiverse places on the planet, as well as home to endangered animals like jaguars, macaws, and toucans.

He’s not alone in finding inspiration in the Pacific forest. Colombian sound artist Lucrecia Dalt has spent time there too, recording soundscapes which formed and altered her unique perspective, pervading experimental work like her 2020 album No era sólida. “It was a profound form of meditation,” she says. “I took long walks in the forest and just sat and listened and recorded there. It was one the best electro-acoustic experiences of my life: It’s so rich and voluminous. With focused listening, you can start to conceive patterns and coincidences.”

Mejía has taken his call to nature beyond music, teaming up with conservation campaign Stand for Trees. Last year, he took a journey through the forest and created a documentary to raise awareness of environmental threats. Among the many encroachments upon Colombia’s ecosystem, the pollution and diversion of water systems is one of the greatest. “For us, it is like you are taking our mother away—water is the blood of the territory,” says Marcela Jaik, a conservationist from the Embera community, one of Colombia’s many Indigenous groups.

The stakes are high in Latin America, and especially in Colombia: This Embera community, like many in the country, suffers violence at the hands of those who see them as obstacles, to trafficking, illegal crops, mining, or industrial agriculture. Colombia is the most dangerous country on the planet for land and environmental defenders, many of whom pay for their work with their lives.

Mejía says he embarked on his sonic journey to find “a new way to connect to the earth,” but it’s clear that he discovered an older one: traditional instruments and beats that mimic and echo nature, bringing us back to it, reminding us we’re a part of its matrix.

Sonic Forest, Mejía’s second album as Monte and the soundtrack to the Stand for Trees documentary, is saturated with folkloric sounds, recordings of coastal marimba and Andean wooden flutes. Numerous tracks incorporate singing he recorded along the way, from the Afro-descendent communities of the coast to the Embera Indigenous communities of the mountains. The record is as much an ode to people as it is to ecology, and the folk element, with its natural instruments, gestures at a shared history for a Colombian listener.

Simon Mejía records an Embera flautist in a recent documentary aimed at raising awareness of environmental threats in Colombia

For these artists, inspiration takes many forms: awe, peace, a longing for a lost past, or resonance with the rhythms of rural and agricultural life. And yet there are also real concerns about these mostly middle-class producers appropriating folk culture, and of the fetishization of rural life’s poverty and hardship. Sampling unnamed musicians has long been as common as it is problematic, particularly when those musicians are from marginalized groups: In Latin America, Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities remain subject to racism, socio-economic oppression, and government neglect across the continent.

Producers like Mejía and Shika Shika might be spared these accusations by their collaborative approaches with folk artists—co-creating the music and crediting them on tracks. The proceeds of Shika Shika’s albums of birdsong went to conservationists, and Mejía’s work with Stand for Trees helps train and fund the forests’ communities. Illegal logging is often the only source of income for the most impoverished areas of Colombia, but these projects aim to generate alternative economic activities, and build capacity in administration, governance, and management.

Beyond direct action, artists are also seeking to awaken listeners not just to environmental catastrophes, but to how we can better understand our relationship with the world around us. Many of these producers are upbeat about the bonds being re-formed.

“It is cause for great optimism,” Mejía attests. “You wake up those fibers of connection to nature again, even from your home in London, your office in New York. We have put ourselves above nature, but this music is a form of healing—through these sounds, people can reconnect to themselves.”