Mala Fama‘s Río Cayápas and NXDLLI offer two complementary readings of the same journey. Both emerged from Esteban Farinango’s time in the Afro-Ecuadorian community of Telembí in Esmeraldas and were developed simultaneously, before OTONO label head Luis Clériga suggested presenting them as a double release. Río Cayápas stays close to communal music-making, while NXDLLI carries traces of these experiences into more abstract and introspective territory.
Río Cayápas makes its intentions immediately clear. It opens with field recordings that place the listener in a specific environment before entering into what the liner notes describe as a dialogue with “local ethnic and autochthonous sounds.” Traditional rhythms from the province of Esmeraldas, recorded in the Telembí community, provide the foundation. Electronics work closely within this material, reinforcing percussion, marimba and voices until the boundaries between acoustic performance and electronic intervention become difficult to locate.
NXDLLI turns towards resonance, atmosphere and slowly shifting textures, with rhythm largely receding from view. Recordings made in Esteban’s hometown of Ibarra filter quietly through the album, sometimes almost imperceptibly, particularly in “wakay”, “minervita” and “AMSA”. Environmental sounds become fragments of acoustic memory, retaining a connection to place even as their original context grows indistinct.
Heard together, the two records continually illuminate one another. Río Cayápas foregrounds community, ritual and embodied rhythm; NXDLLI draws those experiences into introspective electroacoustic landscapes. Their shared sources make the differences between them all the more revealing.
The accompanying remix collection demonstrates how much possibility remains within Mala Fama’s material. Each contributor finds something different in the originals. Entrañas draws out memory and dream; Omaar pushes the rhythms towards deconstructed bass; The Hissed finds unexpected harmonic warmth through ambient drum & bass; Viiaan turns birdsong into the principal melodic voice; Siete Catorce amplifies the ritual energy already embedded in the percussion; DNZA reveals surprising correspondences between Afro-Ecuadorian rhythms and footwork; and Quixosis dissolves the project into ambient resonance, bringing it close once again to landscape.
Across both albums, traditional and electronic elements share the same musical space without settling into a clear hierarchy. Farinango allows percussion, marimba, voices, field recordings and electronics to interact until their respective roles become increasingly porous. Río Cayápas and NXDLLI trace the same journey through northern Ecuador from different perspectives, preserving the immediacy of encounters in Telembí alongside the altered forms those experiences assume through distance and memory.
To trace the river back to its source, I caught up with Esteban over Zoom.
NXDLLI and Río Cayápas explore the same path from two distinct perspectives. One is more closely linked to electroacoustic experimentation and ambient textures; the other foregrounds the music and rituals of Esmeraldas. At what point did you realize that this project needed to be divided into two releases? Was this an idea that was present from the beginning or did it emerge naturally during the creative process?
My creative process isn’t linear. I never begin by thinking, I’m going to make an album. I’m always collecting sounds. Wherever I go, I record things that interest me because I’m constantly looking for material to experiment with.
When I travelled to Esmeraldas and spent time in an Afro-Ecuadorian community, I recorded field recordings, instruments and all kinds of everyday sounds. From the beginning, I wanted to create something that captured the atmosphere of that place. A lot of projects combine electronic music with traditional music, but the two often remain separate—as if the electronics exist on one side and the traditional instruments on the other. I wanted to avoid that. My intention was to preserve the roots of the music while introducing just enough electronics to place it within a contemporary context.
To me, that approach makes the music feel more alive. I love techno and electronic music, but sometimes purely electronic music can feel a little soulless. I wanted the electronics to support the traditional music rather than dominate it.
At first, I was simply planning to make an EP. Around that time I received a grant from SAYCE—the Ecuadorian authors’ and composers’ society—which allowed me to develop the project properly. I initially wrote three tracks based on the material I had recorded in Esmeraldas.
At the same time, though, I was recording completely different sounds closer to home. My grandmother would take me to waterfalls and perform prayers for my journey, surrounding me with flowers and blessings. I recorded her voice, the river, the birds—everything around us. Those recordings gradually led me towards another idea: creating long, ambient pieces built from atmosphere rather than rhythm.
So I found myself working on two projects simultaneously. Then I met Luis Clériga from the Mexican label Otono. I told him about both projects: the rhythmically driven EP inspired by Esmeraldas and this second collection of ambient pieces. He immediately suggested combining them into a single release, with one side dedicated to the Afro-Ecuadorian, percussion-based material and the other exploring the more ambient, electroacoustic side. I thought it made perfect sense because the contrast between the two approaches actually revealed that they belonged to the same creative process.
So, in the end, dividing the project into two complementary releases wasn’t my original idea—it was Luis’s. As soon as he suggested it, though, I realised it was exactly the right way to present the music.
The Cayápas River and the Telembí community occupy a central place in both albums, but they never appear as mere backdrops or soundscapes. They become spaces of memory, ritual, and imagination. During your time there, was there any sound, encounter, or experience that decisively changed the course of the project?
Everything was new to me. Even getting there felt like part of the experience. You can’t reach the community by road—you have to travel for almost three hours by boat before disappearing into the jungle. Once you’re there, there’s no phone signal. They have generators, but electricity isn’t available all the time, so you’re completely disconnected.
At the same time, the place is incredibly abundant. Fruit trees are everywhere. You walk around, pick a banana, a mango or some cacao straight from the trees, go down to the river and start fishing. There’s a real sense of living alongside nature.
But it’s also an extremely poor community. That’s the contradiction. Everything is beautiful, yet people have very limited access to basic services because they’re so remote. The government has largely forgotten them.
What really struck me was meeting the local marimba maker. He’s a remarkable luthier whose instruments are highly sought after by musicians from outside the community. He harvests all the wood himself and builds every instrument by hand, yet he receives almost no recognition or support. Seeing that made me realise there was a political dimension to what I was experiencing. I felt incredibly fortunate to be there and to learn from them, and I also felt a responsibility to tell people how they live, what their music sounds like and what that community means—from my own perspective, of course.
What impressed me most wasn’t just the landscape but the people themselves. In many ways they’re incredibly rich without necessarily thinking of themselves that way. They live surrounded by fruit, by the river, by music. People are constantly singing or playing drums, and music is woven into everyday life.
They also have an extraordinary number of musical traditions connected to different moments of community life. During funerals, for example, women perform beautiful vocal chants that I would love to record one day. Unfortunately, when I visited there weren’t any ceremonies taking place, so I couldn’t document them. There are other celebrations where musicians travel along the river at night in boats, playing marimba and drums as they move through the water. They also have ceremonies where people dress in costumes made from leaves, preserving traditions that clearly trace back to their African heritage.
What amazed me was that all of this exists just a few hours from where I live, yet most people in Ecuador know very little about it. That became one of my motivations for the project: to learn as much as I could and to show that this small country contains an extraordinary diversity of cultures that deserve to be heard.
The visit itself happened thanks to a friend of mine, DJ Mamba System. He had already been there several times because he bought a marimba from the local luthier, so he knew the community well. You can’t simply book a hotel or arrange a visit online. You need to know someone. Families welcome you into their homes, often without expecting anything in return. My friend invited me to come with him, introduced me to everyone, and that’s how the whole experience began. They were incredibly generous people, and we became friends very quickly.
So this might be a bit of a silly question, but do they have their own language?
They speak Spanish, but some words and expressions in their songs come from Yoruba, reflecting their African heritage. It isn’t a language they use in everyday conversation, but traces of it survive in the music.
What’s really interesting is that they share the region with an Indigenous community. I can’t remember the name right now (CHACHIS), but they’ve lived alongside each other for generations. As a result, some people also speak the Indigenous language, and the two cultures have influenced one another over a very long period.
The history behind that is fascinating. A slave ship was wrecked off the Ecuadorian coast, and many of the enslaved Africans managed to escape. They fled into the jungle, where they eventually encountered the Indigenous communities already living there. From that point on, they shared knowledge, traditions and ways of life. You can actually hear that history in the music. Some of the melodic patterns in Afro-Ecuadorian traditions closely resemble those found in Indigenous music, so there’s this beautiful cultural exchange embedded in the sound itself.
Did they find it strange that an electronic musician had come all that way to learn from them?
Not really. To be honest, I don’t even think of myself as a purely electronic musician. I also play guitar and work with acoustic instruments, so our conversations naturally revolved around their music rather than mine.
I did play them some of my work. They thought it was nice, but they weren’t especially interested in the electronic aspect of it—and that’s completely understandable. They simply said, “That’s cool. Thanks for coming.”
What mattered much more to them was sharing their own musical traditions. They have an extraordinary number of rhythms and musical practices that very few people know about, and they’re genuinely happy when someone wants to listen and help bring that music beyond the community. In the end, that became my role: not to introduce them to electronic music, but to help make their music heard by more people.
The remix album feels more like a continuation of the original project than a complement. Artists like Kelman Duran, Omaar, Siete Catorce, and DNZA take the tracks into unexpected territories. What criteria did you use to choose the collaborators? Were you specifically looking for them to reinterpret the material from perspectives very different from your own?
The idea for the remix album came quite naturally because the original release was very short—it was only a cassette with a handful of tracks. Luis from Otono and I started talking about ways of expanding the project, and one of us suggested asking friends to reinterpret the music. It immediately felt like the right thing to do.
I contacted the people I’m closest to musically and asked whether they’d be interested in remixing the EP. Rather than assigning specific tracks, I sent them the whole release and let each artist choose the piece they felt most connected to. I wanted everyone to work from genuine enthusiasm rather than obligation.
Luis approached it from the other side. He reached out to artists through his own network, particularly musicians from Mexico, and he has a really good instinct for matching artists with material. In the end, it became a true collaboration—half through my connections, half through his.
We also wanted to bring together people who have shaped what Latin American electronic music has become over the last decade. Fortunately, many of them are friends. Kelman Duran, for example, is someone I’m very close to. He came to Ecuador a couple of years ago and since then we’ve been constantly exchanging music and ideas. Siete Catorce is another artist I’ve admired for a long time. I think we’ve been in touch for more than ten years. I still remember hearing his music for the first time and thinking, “Wow, this is Latin American electronic music.” He was one of the artists who really opened that door for me.
Luis also invited artists I deeply respect, like Omaar, as well as VIAAN, who is originally from Mexico and is now based in Berlin. Everyone involved already had a very distinctive musical identity, which was exactly what we wanted. None of the remixes tries to imitate the original tracks. Each one takes the material somewhere completely different while remaining connected to the spirit of the project. I think that’s why the remix album works so well—it doesn’t feel like an appendix to the original release. Every artist brings their own personality to the music, and the reinterpretations genuinely surprised me.
You described these albums as a “message of Latin American unity.” At a time when much of experimental electronic music continues to look towards Europe or North America, your work draws on Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian traditions without turning them into folklore. What does this idea of Latin American unity mean to you, both from a cultural and a musical point of view?
That’s an interesting question because the idea actually came out of a political situation. Ecuador and Mexico went through a serious diplomatic crisis after our current president ordered the raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito. As a result, diplomatic relations were suspended. There is currently no Mexican embassy in Ecuador and no Ecuadorian embassy in Mexico.
Luis, who runs Otono, is Mexican, and I’m Ecuadorian. We were watching all of this unfold while working together on these records. For us, the project became a way of saying that, despite what governments are doing, we’re still family. We’re making music together, exchanging ideas and building something collectively. That felt much more important than political divisions.
At the same time, Latin America is going through a difficult moment. Across much of the continent, right-wing governments are cutting support for culture while aligning themselves politically with North America and Israel. Cultural funding is often the first thing to disappear, even when basic public services are already struggling. We wanted these records to carry a different message: that beyond politics we share histories, cultures and values that connect us across borders.
Our societies are also becoming increasingly polarised. Everything seems reduced to left versus right, with very little room for dialogue. Music can remind us that there’s something else worth protecting. Every country has its own cultural identity, but those identities also speak to one another. That’s what I mean by Latin American unity.
For centuries we’ve looked towards Europe or North America for artistic reference points. We absorbed ideas coming from elsewhere and adapted them to our own realities. Over the last fifteen or twenty years, though, something has begun to change. More and more artists are asking themselves: “Who are we? What stories belong to this place?” We live differently, we think differently and we experience the world differently. It’s time we started telling those stories ourselves instead of letting other people tell them for us. For me, that’s what finding a Latin American voice is really about.
Finally, could you tell me a little about Ecuador’s experimental and electronic music scene? Outside Ecuador, very little is known about it.
Ecuador actually has a much longer electronic music history than many people realise. The great pioneer is Mesías Maiguashca, who moved to Germany and worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen and many of the leading figures of European electronic music in the 1960s and ’70s. He’s someone every Ecuadorian working in experimental music looks up to.
The problem is that it’s still very difficult to make a living from this kind of music in Ecuador. Most people simply don’t understand it. If you’re making ten-minute electroacoustic pieces full of strange sounds, they think you’re either wasting your time or completely crazy.
There are only a handful of people making this kind of music. Artists like Quixosis, Joaquín Cornejo and a few others are doing really interesting work, but we’re talking about a very small community.
Recently I’ve also seen some exciting initiatives around field recording. There are artists organising hikes into the mountains where participants record environmental sounds, then come back together to process the recordings and practise deep listening. I haven’t taken part myself, but I think it’s a wonderful idea because it encourages people to engage with the sonic environment in a completely different way.
Most of this activity happens in Quito. I live in Ibarra, a small town about two or three hours away, and the local experimental scene is almost non-existent. There are maybe ten people interested in electroacoustic music here. Everyone else is listening to reggaeton and going out partying—which is completely fine—but it means experimental music remains very marginal.
I actually came to this music through metal. I grew up listening to the darkest and heaviest metal I could find, especially black metal. Ambient black metal eventually led me towards electroacoustic music, and suddenly I realised there was this whole other way of thinking about sound. Once I discovered it, I couldn’t stop experimenting.
What keeps me optimistic is that Ecuador is full of sounds that haven’t yet been explored. The musical traditions, the landscapes, the different cultures—there’s an almost infinite amount of material to work with. Experimental music here is still a very small field, but I think that’s exactly what makes it exciting.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
a closer listen 