“Rituals carry not only thousands of years of wisdom, they are also a living form of resistance. No matter how many empires try to erase it, it survives and it thrives. Why? Because life depends on it. It has to do with the sovereignty of the living and the relations between the living. It is a basic need as a collective to come together, reset, remember, dance with purpose and feel part of a bigger whole.”



AWICHAS, the psychedelic folk/electronica formation founded by Amsterdam-based artist Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, is a lifelong work: the total ever-shapeshifting sum of an existence devoted to ritual and community. During more recent travels back to her homeland of Bolivia, Ibelisse had some very powerful experiences with different teachers – activists, anarchists, craftspeople, ritual workers, shamans.

“AWICHAS is born from the experience I had in the Andes of being initiated in the ancient customs,” Ibelisse says. “This experience marks not only the beginning of a new approach to making art and music, but it births a new persona. Namely Phaxsi Uma, my new name. And that is the story we are telling with the music. A pilgrimage of sorts, that underlines the  reconnection with home, roots, wisdoms, rituals and sound as dialogue with humans and ecosystems.”

In this musical quest to mend the fractures of her own displacement, Ibelisse found close collaborators: kindred souls eager to summon this new adventurous sound on stage. Experimental musician Jochem van Tol, drummer Frank Rosaly, Nihiloxica-percussionist Jacob Maskell-Key, composer Lida Brouskari, and artist/vocalist Julia Werner. It resulted in rapturous, genre-blending performances at beloved festivals such as Le Guess Who?, Rewire and North Sea Jazz.

AWICHAS doesn’t treat folklore and electronics as sonic opposites, but as equal agents of transcendence. That dialogue comes down to a huge musical inspiration and main theme for the project: the "tropas" communities in the Andes that play together during ceremonies; which Ibelisse compares to multiple oscillators, in the case of the electronics being the multiple "voices" of these tropas.



“I started asking myself: why am I as fascinated by a machine instrument as I am by these Andean flutes?,’ Ibelisse says. “And I realized that what they have in common is that both sounds are so pure, and you can’t really manipulate them. You have to collaborate with them; they move with you. It’s not an instrument where, as a human, you are virtuosically on top of it – you actually have to humble yourself in order for the sound to be generated.”

“Ibi and I have been collaborating for a long time in different projects,” adds Van Tol. “The way we aways talk about art or music is often not so much in the language of music itself. We talk about ecosystems, or developments in time, or building structures. So we kind of found our own language, like we did in other projects. Ibi’s heritage is also very much related to ecosystems, to music connected to life in the mountains, but also a life which is, in a sense, so surreal because of how you relate to your surroundings.”


Though optics may suggest Jochem’s background as artistic researcher, composer, synth-ecosystem-builder and interactive-light-installation-developer is the antithesis of Ibelisse’s artistic practice, with AWICHAS, their long-standing artistic relationship has broken the possibilities wide open.  “I understand why you’d want to work with an instrument that, if you want to make contemporary translations, makes you think: how can I build a new ecosystem?”, says Van Tol. “That’s something I’ve been fascinated by for a long time.The way I work is always a dialogue with the material, and I think that’s how we found a form that comes more into the middle of both our inspirations, after all the projects we’ve done together.”

A big proponent of AWICHAS’s magic is the playful, often surprising ways the modern and the mystical can potentially meet in the middle; creating fun juxtapositions that feel rife with spiritual fervor and ingenuity. To name an example: in Sweden, Van Tol saw a performance that inspired him to compose a track with “this super hardcore FM synthesis” called “Thunderdome”, named after the famous Dutch happy hardcore brand.


“I didn’t know that for Ibi, “Thunderdome” meant something completely different,” Van Tol reflects. “This whole other story about Tata Santiago and a goddess of thunder on a mountain in Bolivia. For her, Thunderdome was related to an ancient, beautiful ritual in the mountains, and I was just thinking about a Dutch gabber party. We talked about it last week like, “Hey, wow, that’s a funny misunderstanding.”

As of now AWICHAS as a collaborative entity continues to mushroom at an infectious pace, with an abundance of perspectives, sounds, influences and materials under a single umbrella. In the words of famous sociologist, activist and anarchist Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: Un mundo ch’ixi es posible – a world where all contradictions have to live with each other, is indeed possible.