With Aves de Nahá, Bosque Vacío turn from the fractured wetlands of Mexico City toward the dense cosmologies of the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. Where 2023’s Cantera Oriente traced the unstable boundaries between quarry, reserve and megapolis — a site where nature exists in continuous dialogue with urbanism — this new work listens further back and further outward. Asphalt gives way to canopy; infrastructural hum yields to breath, feather, omen.
Developed through an exchange between anthropology, ornithology and the Lacandon community of Nahá, the album situates birds not as documentary field-recording subjects but as sentient presences embedded in ritual, subsistence and prophecy. Crucially, they are never presented in isolation. Each call is heard within the dense, breathing tapestry of the forest — insects, wind, distant movement, the porous acoustics of foliage and the echo of the immanent. The jungle is not a backdrop but a resonant body. Meaning arises not from a single voice but from interrelation.
The opening “Kok ta’” centres on the clay-coloured thrush (Turdus grayi), whose cyclical song marks seasonal transition. In Nahá it signals beginnings and rebirth; elsewhere in Central America its cultural weight is equally pronounced. In 1977, Costa Rica designated the clay-coloured thrush — locally known as the Yigüirro — as its national bird, not for flamboyant plumage but for symbolic and communal resonance.
Bosque Vacío honour that ethos structurally. The track withholds the birdsong at first, building a low-lit emotional terrain from diffused harmonics and near-subliminal pulses. A humid expectancy gathers, thick as understory. When the thrush finally enters, it does so already enmeshed in the forest’s polyphony. Its repetitions articulate time, but always in dialogue with surrounding life — a pulse nested within a wider, animate grid.
“K’ambul” descends into lower registers. The Great Curassow (Crax rubra), a large pheasant-like bird associated in Lacandon cosmology with fire and with the preparation of sacred nah wah tamales, emits a deep, percussive call. Around it, the drone of the forest floor embeds the bird in ambient rustle and spatial depth. The piece feels hearth-bound yet ecological, reflecting the curassow’s role in balancing fire, earth and communal labour.
On “Ch’om”, featuring the Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus), restraint becomes principle. In Lacandon belief, the vulture safeguards ethical hunting, punishing excess by causing weapons to rot or meat to spoil. The music mirrors this moral economy: sparse wing-flutters, stark reverb tails, spliced through negative space with the faint murmur of the forest persisting. Even in apparent minimalism, the environment surrounds and contextualises the bird’s presence.
“Säk Ch’ich’” (White Hawk) introduces verticality and release. Considered a sacred “domestic of the gods,” its call announces impending rain. High, tensile tones arc across the upper frequencies while a slow subsonic rumble accrues beneath, until rainfall begins to saturate the mix. Through this downpour, Leena Lee’s voice drifts in and out — half-song, half-incantation — merging with the hiss of water and the crackling of vegetation. The gesture is less performative than elemental, as if the human voice were another current within the storm. The hawk’s cry slices through canopy and rain alike; it never floats free of them. Climate, divinity and embodiment converge in a single acoustic field to the closing sound of bells.
“Säk buj” engages ambivalence. The Barn Owl (Tyto alba), once heard as a messenger of visits, is today often feared under Tseltal influence as an omen linked to witchcraft. Its cry, uncannily anthropomorphic, emerges from nocturnal ambience — insects, distant water, the hollowed acoustics of night. Vocalic synth tones hover between lament and alarm, yet the owl remains part of a wider nocturne, not a gothic caricature detached from place.
The closing piece, “K’in” (Squirrel Cuckoo, Piaya cayana), returns to communicative clarity, yet it does so through respiration. Meaning “sun, day, prophecy,” the bird is said to have been taught by the gods to speak to humans, warning of snakes or accidents. Here, breath becomes structural. Audible inhalations and exhalations — a technique already central to Cantera Oriente, where breath mediated between body and megacity and where natural processes rubbed constantly against urban infrastructures — pulse beneath and between the cuckoo’s calls. The human respiratory cycle aligns with avian utterance, modelling listening as a shared physiological act. Subtle shifts in filtering and spatialisation answer each phrase, but it is breath that binds them, turning prophecy into exchange rather than pronouncement. As elsewhere on the album, the cuckoo’s voice remains braided with forest ambience, underscoring that even warning is ecological.
Birdsong has become near-ubiquitous within contemporary sound practice through multiple takes, from Mappa’s Synthetic Birds compilation to Flaming Pines’ Birds of a Feather series. Aves de Nahá sidesteps any tendency to aestheticise the nonhuman or to try and mimic it through digital sounds. Instead, Bosque Vacío focus on entanglement — not to assert the supremacy of the Anthropocene, but, on the contrary, to gesture toward the Symbiocene, with the human voice learning from birdsong and functioning as a participant within a living mesh.
If Cantera Oriente staged a tense yet generative conversation between ecology and megacity, Aves de Nahá proposes reciprocity — a listening practice grounded in cosmology rather than infrastructure. By keeping each bird embedded within the forest’s sonic and spiritual weave, foregrounding breath as connective tissue, and allowing the human voice to surface and recede within rain and canopy, the duo articulate a Lacandon worldview in which nothing speaks alone. These pieces resist extraction. They ask the listener to enter the jungle as one voice among many — accountable to the chorus. (Gianmarco Del Re)
a closer listen 