Egungun: Percussion sextets by Louis Franz Aguirre

EGUNGUN: EARTH-SHATTERING PERCUSSION

Ekkozone Records proudly presents the Valencia-based SoXXI Percussion Group and their decade-spanning collaboration with Louis Franz Aguirre (b. 1968), one of the foremost Latin American composers of today.

EGUNGUN features premiere recordings of Aguirre’s ground-breaking percussion sextets, a singular body of work which conjures up the composer’s mystical-religious universe. Elements from traditional Afro-Cuban percussion music, Indian classical music and Iannis Xenakis’s percussion writing are some of the sources that Aguirre draws upon, yet his musical language is wholly original.

Visceral and highly dramatic, the five compositions on EGUNGUN encompass every conceivable dynamic nuance, from evocative gongs and incantations of ancient Yoruba texts to terrifying textures, screams, and a profusion of drums and unconventional metallic percussion sounds, including the unheard-of and stunningly captured sound of electric hammer drills drilling into car rims!

EGUNGUN is the follow-up to Ekkozone’s, ORULA, which was picked as one of the best albums of 2023 by the leading Danish music magazine Seismograf.