After composing Screaming Trees (2019), I felt I still had much to explore, both poetically and sonically, with the ideas in David Kopenawa’s book. Especially after finding an audio recording of a shamanic ritual conducted by David Kopenawa himself on the internet. The voice sounds in the piece come from such a recording, kindly provided by Brazilian field recording engineer Marcos Wesley. The title of this sequel translated to English is The Xapiri’s Rebellion. The name adds one more layer of indications to listeners on the subjects and metaphors present in the piece. Like in Screaming Trees, I am working with chains of archetypical sounds to represent higher-order subjects. For instance, the recognizable sounds of bikes, cars, and aeroplanes represent urban societies’ means of transport. Metaphorically, this sound chain indicates urban societies’ necessity to move increasingly faster, in an underlined battle against time.

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Meanwhile, I used some spectro-morphological “rhymes” between sounds, such as the similarities of the “roar” of felines and sounds of motor devices, that could potentially provoke rich thoughts in the listener’s minds.

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Finally, passages from the book have inspired me to compose sections of the piece, acting as a latent atmosphere driving the composition. One such selection is this:

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“... For us, the xapiri are the true owners of “nature,” not human beings. The xapiri are continually moving around the entire forest without our knowing [...]. These are words that white people do not understand. They think forests are dead and empty, that nature is out there for no reason, and that it is mute. They don’t want to listen to either our or spirit’s words. They prefer deafness. [...] The forest is alive. It can only die if white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat. The dried-up earth will become empty and silent. The Xapiri spirits who come down from the mountains to play on their mirrors in the forest will escape far away. Their shaman fathers will no longer be able to call them and make them dance to protect us. They will be powerless to repel the epidemic fumes which devour us. They will no longer be able to hold back the evil beings who will turn the forest into chaos. We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will nally perish. Then, if none of them survives to hold it up, the sky will fall.”

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