Within the album’s most haunting passage, Jaar outlines the connection between the colonization of Chile and the Holy Land. (Chile can be residence to the world’s largest Palestinian diaspora exterior the Center East.) He compares the title of the Magdalena river, bestowed by Spanish colonist Rodrigo de Bastidas, to the traditional Jewish metropolis Magdala, later an Arab village referred to as al-Majdal which was destroyed and changed by the Israeli settlement of Migdal. Jaar highlights the significance—and brute pressure—of (re)naming:
You say that you just’re by the Magdalena river.
And I converse to you about Palestine.
Which is now not Palestine.
And the Rio Grande is now not Karacalí,
No, the river is now not Karihuaña
It’s now not Guacahayo.
But it surely nonetheless is Guacahayo! It’s the river of tombs!
Does a spot change whenever you rename it? Does it turn out to be one thing else? These emotions of loss and confusion are underlined on one other spotlight, “Mi Viejita,” a memory on locations that may now not be reached. These are individuals who go away their lives—one another, their farms, their livestock—to go to conflict for a colonial entity, solely to be oppressed by a navy junta and a strict curfew that gives them no thanks in return, redefining the land they fought for as one thing that now not belongs to them. The music’s emotional upheaval is soundtracked by a damaged beat that sounds virtually drunken, too gradual and staggered to face up straight, and chatter within the background solely enhances the chaotic environment.
The music behind the vocals on Piedras 1 is impressionistic and grayscale, with bursts of noise, barking canines, and synths that sound like indignant elephants marking the themes of alienation and identification in flux. Piedras 2, alternatively, collects interstitial music from the radio play and veers from cerebral experimentation—just like the elegant, barely jazzy “Radio Chomio,” that includes the Mapuche artist Eli Wewentxu—to all-out membership mayhem, just like the closing “SSS” trilogy, which harks again to Jaar’s early days as a club-kid upstart. Solely now, the music is frantic and claustrophobic, as if making an attempt to interrupt out of its personal rhythmic constructions, a violent type of self-assertion.
Jaar has a approach with creating house and distance in music, which lends itself naturally to constructing narratives. Components like kick drums or voices usually sound like they’re coming from the subsequent room over, till issues abruptly, briefly, snap into focus, a tool Jaar makes use of again and again to emphasise a very powerful elements of Piedras. It helps the double album really feel somewhat extra direct, a foil to Jaar’s typical aloofness.
