Come horns and trumpets, come echo and percussion. The descent into thesubterranean fields is easy. But to retrace your steps into heaven's air: Thereis the trouble, there is the toil. Beheaded Totem, the second album by the enigmatic Portuguese ensembleHHY & The Macumbas, leads us straight into the damp caves of our minds.Their 2014 debut Throat Permission Cut was described as “a massivesynapses bombardment in a short circuit between Glenn Branca and AdrianSherwood,” and yes: HHY & The Macumbas have continued their march intothe undiscover’d countries of psychoacoustics. Febrile, haunting and at timesoverwhelming, Beheaded Totem is nothing short of a dream for the necro-tourist. Cerebral and alluring. Toxic. Welcome to the four-dimensionalmeltdown. “Beheaded Totem continues a long investigation into percussion, circularrhythms, dub strategies, and horns coming from the alcohol-fuelledPortuguese marching bands,” says constructor and conductor in the world ofHHY & The Macumbas, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha. For those not familiar withthe Macumbas, they are a shifting musical entity. Built amid smoke and fieryred lights, the performers on Beheaded Totem are: João Pais, Filipe Silva,Frankão and Brendan Hemsworth on percussion, and Álvaro Almeida, AndréRocha and Rui Fernandes on horns. An Arkestra reaching not for the starsbut the boiling core under our feet. This music stems from a deep connection with the streets of Porto and itsundertones, nights and drags,” Saldanha says. Emerging from SOOPA, anart and music production unit based in the old harbour city, he has been aleading force in the Portuguese experimental music scene since the early2000s, through which he coined a signature “skull-cave echo.” “It comes with a love for trance, otherness and sound pressure,” he explains.Beheaded Totem is indeed a pulsating and physical album, revealing both anultimate pain and unbearable joy – a funereal ecstasy – as if everything mightcollapse in on itself at any moment. The disruptive nature of the seven tracksalso hints at a free form. They are more evocations than songs, found in thedepths Saldanha reached for in the filmic and musical explorations of TunnelVision (2016), made alongside director and musician Raz Mesinai. Recordedin tunnels and cavities in and around the city of Porto, the sub-frequencies ofTunnel Vision functioned as a panoramic documentation of the underground,a “dub fiction,” as Mesinai put it. Add the Macumbas’ already famed livecapacities evoked on this album, and Beheaded Totem comes across as afear- less interpretation of sulphurous storms. Both meticulous and massive,raw and ravishing, as if their minds are set on rewilding a hollow earth. And as the nightly creatures prepare themselves to join HHY & TheMacumbas in a final Danse Macabre, they might realize what they’re in for: tonever find their way back to the corrosions of daylight. But, then again, somesacrifices come with joy. – Tore Engelsen Espedal, May 2018
