Taking song titles from the Arawak language, the Estamos Trio of Thollem McDonas (piano), Milo Tamez (drums) and Carmina Escobar (voice & electronics) brings together artists from the Mexican/U.S. border, creating beautiful creative works.
Format: CD Condition: M Released: 2013 Country: USA Packaging: Digipack Recorded in Anahuac, Mexico City, Mexico; San Jeronimo, Cuernavace, Mexico; I-Park, The Devil's Hopyard, Connecticut, USA; and Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, California, CA. Recorded by Carmina Escobar.
"Estamos Trio is a continuation of Estamos Ensemble, which Thollem began in 2009, bringing together musicians from both sides of the Mexican/U.S. border.The first album was a double disc release on Edgetone Records and features improvisations as wells premieres of works written specifically for the ensemble.The verb 'estamos' in Spanish means 'we are' in the non-permanent sense. This is intrinsic to the nature of every Estamos project: always changing and open to new and different kinds of involvement.
Carmina Escobar
Carmina Escobar is a vocalist, sound, and intermedia artist from Mexico City whose work focuses primarily on sound, the voice, the body, materials, images, technology and the interrelations of them all. She has collaborated in many different projects that explore a diversity of sonorous languages such as contemporary music, medieval music, opera, folk music, improvisation, electronic music, and experimental trends involving interdisciplinary collaborations, and new technologies.
In her personal work Carmina integrates interdisciplinary and multimedia elements such as video, body motion, abstract narrative, and the real-time processing of sound from organic and inorganic sources. She makes use of concrte elements through electronic media in order to cause situations and generate new routes to create dialogues and points of encounter through free improvisation, experimentation, and her experience with the academic study of different forms of music. All of this as a means to explore the areas in which intuition and consciousness appear as common elements in the individual's imagination.
Milo Tamez
Percussion artist Milo Tamez from San Luis Potos, Mxico, has been involved in the improvised and experimental music Mexican scene for the last decade. His openness to a diversity of art languages and his unique approach in music making, has given him the reputation as one of the leading voices in the Mexican improvisation and experimental music community. Strongly influenced by the contemporary percussion solo repertoire from the 20th century, his drumming and artistic development has evolved into a wide diverse vocabulary and creative musicianship. An innate composer, his approach to percussion overrides any tendency in vogue, always in the search of explorative unknown territories for emotional communication and genuine aesthetic construction. Hes actively performing in musical gatherings and music festivals worldwide as well as leading his own projects.
Thollem McDonas
Thollem, from the San Francisco Bay Area, has been a perpetually traveling musician since 2006. He shares his time between North America and Europe, performing/recording as a soloist, in collaboration with many other individuals and groups, as well as leading large ensemble improvisation/collaboration workshops. His music is diverse, approaching each concert and project uniquely, resulting in dramatically new and different outcomes. Not long after birth, Thollem began studying the keyboard repertoire from the medieval to the 20th century. With degrees in both piano performance and composition, he quit school to dedicate his time to grassroots political movements and ecological restoration projects. In 2005, he returned to music as his full focus, incorporating his experiences into his compositions, improvisations and teaching. Thollem has performed piano concertos with symphonies, played in West African drumming troupes, Javanese gamelan ensembles, punk bands, with many free improvisation groups, and as a comproviser for modern dance and film. He is the founding director of Estamos Ensemble, a Mexican-American cross border ensemble for musical exchange. He is also the lead singer of the Italian agit-punk band Tsigoti, as well as The Hand To Man Band with John Dieterich and Mike Watt. Last year he released 6 albums including a trio album with Nels Cline and William Parker."-Thollem McDonas website
"Composition is freedom and out of the woods comes this lonely melody that doesn't recognize itself in the mirror because every time it is played it looks and sounds different. The tradition was originally about individuality not preservation. It was each musician's job to find his or her own voice... Then acknowledge that each individual voice was part of a larger cosmic voice. So be healed by this music. Leap over tall buildings and bounce."-William Parker, from the liner notes