Pidgins | "Refrains Of The Day, Volume 1"

Pidgins is an experiment in percussive languages. The Mexico City duo transform the oral and rhythmic methods of traditional trance rituals by phasing metric, melodic, and rhetorical phrases. These pattern systems form the grammar Pidgins use to construct linguistic puzzles. Pidgins speak in these tongues in order to interrogate contemporary trance states — managerial class dogmas, self-help literature, and new age therapies.

The "Refrains of the Day" are oft repeated but perhaps poorly understood phrases. By repeating, shifting, and inverting these expressions, we may come to understand them better. Refrains of the Day, Volume 1, to be released fall 2023, features 8 such mantra pieces, and will be followed up in 2024 by Volume 2.

The record achieves an expansive and powerful sound for a duo, featuring a wide array of instrumentation and complex pattern strategies. Percussionist Milo Tamez impressively commands an array of traditional hand and talking drums but also integrates gongs and various small percussion — wood slit drums, guiro, flexatone, rattles, chimes, etc. A lifetime student of jazz and classical percussion as well as African drumming, Tamez employs varied extended techniques and instrumental approaches in the service of richly layered phase and polyrhythms.

Vocalist and electroacoustician Aaron With uses a massive sound vocabulary consisting of sampled rare and historical instruments, richly tuned in just and microtonal intonations. These are paired with nature sounds from foley and field recordings. A few of the select instruments featured on Refrains of the Day, Volume 1 include Cristal Baschet, pitched cicadas, Glass Armonica, filter-tuned rainforest field recordings, metal resonances, circuit-bent Speak 'N Spell, Laotian Kheng, Chinese Sheng, scraped m'biras, Hurdy-Gurdy, nightjars and owls, and torn cardboard. With performs dense, evolving patterns on these instruments using finger percussion techniques. His synthetically processed chant vocals repeat phrases prismatically—their word order slowly shifts, revealing hidden meaning—while triggering autotuned delays, synth resonators, and comb filters. The inorganic vocals clash thoughtfully with the organic instrumentation, creating a cognitive dissonance with which to appreciate the inhuman logic contained in With's chanted mantras. These mantras employ dogma-laden phrases of the technocratic elite, and are repeated to ridiculous effect—until their inner absurdities emerge.