Into the Wood

Listening Post 342. From their formation as Dúa de Pel in 2014, Eva Guillamón and Sonia Megías lived the rarefied life of itinerant artists, flying to Buenos Aires and Beijing, to New York and Tokyo, to London and back to Madrid, performing, lecturing and giving masterclasses, observing assorted cultures as folklorists and musicians. Then 2020: Along with all humanity, they became marooned nomads, traveling only in their imagination. Nurtured in pandemic hibernation, their second album, Madera de Pájaro (Bird’s Wood), is a 13-stop journey as rich as the tangible flights they took before the break (and have since resumed). At the heart of the album is tension between confinement and movement, but the women choose their cultural and artistic inspirations with care: Among other genres, they channel salsa, calypso, chotis madrileño, Algerian chaoui and cabaret; they evoke Chagall and Villa Lobos, sing lullaby, requiem and scat. Their narratives revolve around women under pressure—workers, mourners, strivers, prisoners, exiles and ancestors. And just as birds depend on tree branches, so do Guillamón and Megías touch wood, with marimba, percussion and double bass accompaniment. Backbreaking labor is the engine of songs like Pan Duro (Stale Bread, video 1) drawing on a traditional work chant of Castilian bakers who lighten monotony with rhythmic expressions of protest and purpose; and Orgullo Kelly (Kelly Pride, video 2), a hymn to the solidarity of hotel chambermaids. Delicate vocal-instrumental choreography softens the edges of painful chapters, notably Cárcel de Ventas (Ventas Prison, video 3), recalling a jail for women that became notorious for overcrowding and brutality during the Franco dictatorship. Movimiento (Movement, video 4), reflects freedom and the possibility of navigating life’s challenges. In their songs and travels, Dúa de Pel gracefully suggest that home may be neither where we come from nor where we land but a place, perch or dream in between. (Oradek Records)

Dúa de Pel: Madera de Pájaro
Eva Guillamón: Voice, percussion
Sonia Megías: Voice, ukulele, percussion
David Mayoral: Percussion
Miguel Ángel Real: Marimba
Tomás Merlo: Double bass

Pan Duro / Stale Bread
Lyrics: Eva Guillamón/Music Sonia Megías

A polymetric evocation of Castilian bakers

(From the Spanish lyrics)
A welfare society that offers only stale bread
A distant future, impossible to reach
For those who work, as if serving a sentence, to achieve excellence
even if it’s not enough to support a condition called resistance.

If we all blow together with the full strength of our breath
It will make the dark clouds fly so we can gaze at the sky.

Who needs a government with posterboard slogans
whose only mission is to stoke the flames of hell and provoke eternal conflict between equals
to pretend that all evils come from below and free the privileged classes from work?

If we all blow together with the full strength of our breath
It will make the dark clouds fly so we can gaze at the sky.

And the scythes are sharpened and enemies invented
and punishments legislated, disguised as deeds
A democracy so strange that demands freedom
for security overloaded, with fear to feed the belief that bullets bring peace.

If we all blow together with the full strength of our breath
It will make the dark clouds fly so we can gaze at the sky

Orgullo Kelly / Kelly Pride
Lyrics: Eva Guillamón/Music Sonia Megías

On the rights of the chambermaids, “The Kellys,” to the rhythm of calypso.

A carpet full of footprints/They’ve gone, here you can enter
Faster, faster, run!/The clients arrive, primary target
I can’t feel my left arm again/The cart so heavy I can’t move it
Only four hours working, I’m halfway there and I can’t take it anymore
Let’s get going!

Our job is to take care of you so you want to come back
But that doesn’t mean keeping our mouths shut, enduring as slaves that you can exploit
The chambermaids are organized/We are kellys, we are brave
You are not alone, sister!

My neck, your knees, her hands; your legs, her hips, my arms; the back, the girdle, the painkillers…
And beware of complaining if you want to be hired/You charge three euros an hour, they don’t pay vacations
No matter how many beds you make, they accuse you of being slow/And day after day your health goes
Locked up in this hotel so you can have something to eat

Our job is to take care of you so you want to come back
But that doesn’t mean keeping our mouths shut, enduring as slaves that you can exploit
The chambermaids are organized/We are kellys, we are brave
You are not alone, sister!

Movimiento / Movement
Lyrics: Eva Guillamón/Music Sonia Megías

Salsa with convoluted meter to the beat of migrations

When I left home years ago to study, everyone thought I would come back when I finished
But things got hard without English and a career is useless without an MBA.

Water, blood, clouds, wind
Day and night, everything is movement.

When the bombs also got my mother, my sister said it was time to emigrate
By road, because there was no money for a plane, we left without luggage or heart

Water, blood, clouds, wind
Day and, night, everything is movement.

When they announced the new business model, I didn’t imagine my job was coming to an end
And Sundays with movies and blankets with my wife, I now spend looking at my phone while riding a train

Water, blood, clouds, wind
Day and night, everything is movement