On Primordial Mind, the collaborative album by Matthew Ramolo, aka Khôra, and Brandon Miguel Valdivia, aka Mas Aya, released on Marionette, wooden-percussive striking figures open the first two pieces and run like a thread through the album’s opening stretch. And suddenly there is a memory that had long lain dormant deep in the subconscious: music lessons at primary school. Two rhythm sticks in hand, simply starting wildly and clacking them together until a rhythm develops intuitively. Yet this memory appears neither naive nor nostalgically transfigured. Rather, it feels like a return to something primordial: to a form of musical experience that is still entirely immediate, not overlaid by everyday routines, expectations or the burdens of adulthood.
The music therefore feels very physical and direct: tribal, ritualistic, almost as though drawing on a shared primal rhythm. In the context of both artists’ previous work, this approach by no means feels like an outlier. For years, both Khôra and Mas Aya have worked with ritual percussion structures, non-European sound traditions, ambient textures and a strongly spiritual sonic language. The impression arises that this is not composition in the classical sense so much as searching, trying things out and bringing them into a natural flow.
As the album progresses, it withdraws more clearly into more minimalist and meditative spaces. The energy does not diminish, but it shifts: away from immediate percussion towards slowly flowing, hypnotic structures. At the same time, something playful, almost lightly unhinged, remains: improvised glockenspiels, small ringing and noise fragments that seem to fall into the picture by chance, yet sit exactly where they should.n.
