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ALL PIB SLOW PLAY
A SEDIMENTATION OF HISTORY AND SOUND
All Pib Slow Play is a hybrid decelerationist music
and food programming series. The project sets cumbia
rebajada (slowed cumbia) and ambient sounds to the
cooking of tamales using an underground pit-roasting
method — the Pib — streamed on Local Radio.
This project is named after DJ Screw's 1999 record,
All Work No Play, and a letter to Elysia Crampton.
All Pib Slow Play is a means to research, practice,
and evolve a tradition many families have kept alive
across the Americas, while sharing the process and
celebrating the spring outdoors. A performance,
centering slowness as a vehicle, and Kency Cornejo
and Diana Taylor’s ideas of embodied acts “as an
essential mode of cultural, spiritual and social
representation and transmission of knowledge" to
awaken a resistance to Yomaira Figueroa's concept of
‘destierro’ (uprooting) through memories of home/
lands and land practices.
Sound and Food
Suena y Comida
Elysia Crampton once said that through music “the
post-colonial divide between Peru and Bolivia was
bridged.” She was allowed to “glimpse an ancient,
illusive moment of [her] heritage that barred
nationalistic dividings,” and ”these ancestral/
familial narratives, languages, tones, colors…
moved with [her] as [she] musically came of age.”
Music shares these abilities with food culture.
A Pib (pronounced ‘peeb’ in Yucatec Mayan) is an
earth oven of the Yucatán peninsula in Central
America thought to have a pre-Hispanic origin.
According to Wikipedia, “It consists of digging a
hole, lighting a stove with firewood and stones, and
cooking the food (traditionally pork or chicken)
over low heat, all covered with more soil. Today,
many people in Mexico believe that ‘pib’ refers to
tamales cooked in the earth oven (called chachak
waaj in Mayan) and not to the oven itself.” Pibs are
one of the earliest known barbecue techniques with
similarities to practices worldwide, including
across Mesoamerica such as the Peruvian pachamanca.
Ricardo Muñoz explains in Rosalia Chay Chuc's
episode of Chef’s Table:
“ [The Maya] used to have very detailed
history books. But when the Spaniards came,
they burned thousands of them. So they had
to pass all the information by mouth. […]
When the Maya cook a cochinita pibil, it is
a very religious, ancient moment. The
moment they put the pot under the ground,
it means you are giving back to the earth
what you took from the earth.”
The act of slowing down by coming together to cook —
reviving an ancient method used to honor the earth
and one's ancestors — paired with the slowing of
music that was never lost but still found by a
mixed-generation immigrant, and the sharing of both
these ephemeral and cross-cultural forms of
gathering and celebration, can be seen as a way of
building grounds for hybrid identities.
As Dena Yago proposes in her essay Blurred Vibrations,
“That purpose: a shared vibe, a sense of feeling
seen by and belonging with others who are similarly
afflicted […] This cohesion is exemplary of a
collective mood as described by Ludwig Fleck,
wherein ‘the force which maintains the collective
and unites its members is derived from the community
of the collective mood.’” The tones and noise in
ambient music and field recordings act as another
link to distant spatial, temporal and conceptual
moods — those experienced and imagined — like the
psychic warmth of countless pizzas and treasured rice
and bean plates of my youth.
Akin to many children of immigrants, I'm estranged
from unknown parts of my family's cultural
traditions. How do we find recipes for dishes we've
never made, from people we've never met? All Pib
Slow Play is meant to imagine what these recipes and
traditions might be — a gathering composed of a
diaspora of memories, lineages, and lives, when
they can't be accessed through a singular experience.
As Antonio Hernández describes in an interview for
the BBC:
“ In the middle of the mountains of Monterrey,
Mexico, there is a small Colombia, a
Kolombia, a Colombia Regia. It is a place
where both countries connect through
partying and dancing, but also through
uprooting and nostalgia. ‘It's a musical
Macondo,’ […] the world of magical realism
created by the Colombian writer Gabriel
García Márquez.”
“ En medio de las montañas de Monterrey,
México, hay una pequeña Colombia, una
Kolombia, una Colombia Regia.
Es un lugar donde ambos países se conectan
por la fiesta y el baile, pero también por
el desarraigo y la nostalgia.
‘Es un Macondo musical,’ [… el] mundo de
realismo mágico creado por el escritor
colombiano Gabriel García Márquez.”
As Boomkat notes of DJ Screw's Southern influence,
there's “Something about the heat, the distance from
the two coasts.” The evolution of Monterrey's cumbia
rebajada and Houston’s screw run nearly parallel
at the end of the 20th century, separated by only 500
miles and a border.
Cumbia rebajada goes by many names and is often
known by its effects:
* Cumbiambero
* Sonidero
* Tumbada
* Kolombiana
* Wepa
* Submarina
* Subterránea
* Pausado
* Sueñado
* Slowed (to Perfection and Reverbed
and Muffled)
* (Chopped and) Screwed
* Xumbia (as unknown, hybrid, mestizo,
mezclado, destierro)
* Zapatagaze
According to Kumbia Boruka, “starting in the 1960s
vinyl records began arriving from different places
to the turntables of Monterrey's sonideros.
A cultural phenomenon was born, a mixture of
identities and methods. Broadcasting from El Cerro
de la Loma Larga [a hill in Monterrey where a number
of radio station aerials are based], cumbia had
arrived to stay.” Similar to dub, born in Jamaica
in the 1970s, cumbia rebajada DJs slow, mix, and
emcee over “remixes or reworkings of their previous
version […] generationally linked by a
bass frequency.”
The originator of cumbia rebajada, Gabriel Duéñez,
found his slowed down sound in the early 1990s when a
turntable's motor began to break down. Around the
same time, DJ Screw is said to have discovered his
namesake sound while hanging out with friends, likely
due to a dying tape battery. Duéñez and Screw quickly
honed their formulas, producing hundreds of mixes
over the coming decade after locals asked for more,
realizing that reducing the speed of a record gave a
deep, mellow sound that emphasized lyrics to the
point of storytelling.
Histories
Historias
Storytelling remains central to many descendants of
Indigenous groups across the Americas, whose
traditions saved aspects of their culture in the
languagees of, and from, colonizing powers. These
histories of creative subversion center the critical
role of oral culture that thrives in communal spaces
like kitchens and bailes (clubs).
I wonder about the shared resonance of memory
destierro, inaccessible through a singular moment
and experience:
Imitating macho, the emcee's voice rolls
out, over the top, with endless reverb.
Somehere I heard my dad was a radio DJ, and
Kiss Sound's emceeing at bailes awakened
late night day dreams of what it might have
been like to grow up beside him.
There's a specific macho culture — a toxic,
dangerous masculinity — prevalent in Latin
America also present as Kiss repeats he's the
king. So confident he becomes a caricature,
drunk off himself and the fans in his face.
Laughing into the void. Crying later. Kiss
calls out “suena la cumbiaaaaaaaa” (“the
sound of cumbia,” suena a step from sueña;
a dream of some thing, some one or land)
before the first false drop. His voice shifts
throughout the performance, from a base to
a deeper tone, grittier, distorting himself,
with reverb accentuating shoutouts, fading
into the crowd.
Twitter brought me to this music. Maybe part
of what draws me closer is that vague memory
of my dad having been on the FM waves, and
sitting in his Subaru. So rebajada music has
become a form of distant and ambient
connection with a culture that I don't feel I
belong to, but still hold a new relationship
with. Who taught us to screw?
Like Celyn June describes of their ambient track,
Teeth, Like Perfume, All Pib Slow Play “takes place
in a feverish state where things and assumptions
[seem] to connect in unexpected ways. A vague
sensation of belonging, and possibly identification.”
Shapeshifting: Resurrecting, "Abstractions double
over each other, referents increasingly occluded
leaving only the grey matter connecting them to the
signified. Interrelations become substance, raw
materials, mined. A compression algorithm shaves
peaks until nothing remains but a muddy,
disfigured remnant."
There's a story in cumbia rebajada that holds
specific meaning for the marginalized areas of Mexico
that adopted it, which also speaks to the precarious
future our generation faces. As Fernando Frías,
director of Ya No Estoy Aquí, recounts in an article
by Magdiel Olano:
“ For me there's a very strong metaphor in
slowed cumbias, which normally take five
minutes and now are made to last 10, and
how that relates to a lack of opportunities:
‘please don't stop playing music, when the
song is over I want to keep dancing because
now there's nothing else.’”
“ Para mí hay una metáfora muy fuerte entre
las cumbias rebajadas, que normalmente
tardan cinco minutos y ahora están hechas
para durar 10, y cómo eso responde a la
falta de oportunidades: ‘por favor que no
deje de sonar la música, cuando acabe la
rola quiero seguir bailando porque ya no hay
nada más allá.’”
All Pib Slow Play is a chance to move slower with and
closer to the earth through a mixing of sounds,
flavors, and links lost and found. Digging beneath
the surface of our daily accelerationist culture, pib,
rebajada, screw, and ambient methods come together
to manipulate space and time, unearthing impossible
moments in cavities of potential.
VOLUME I
Friday, 15 April, 2022
Yale Farm
Chef Sandra Trigueros
Menu
Menú
Mains Chicken Tamales
masa, chicken, hojas de platano
Veggie Tamales
masa, flor de loroco, green peppers,
hojas de platano
Red sauce
Green sauce
Sides Cole Slaw
Guatemalan Chow Mein
noodles, steamed vegetables and
Guatemalan soy
Cilantro Lime Rice and Beans
black beans, onions, roasted peppers,
cumin and salted herbs
Pib Sweet Potatoes
honey butter with Cobanero chili
and lime
Beverage Agua de Jamaica
Dessert Rice Pudding
coconut milk, vanilla, cinnamon
Mixes
Mezclas
# Adrian Martinez Chavez
# Cody Boyce
# Darnell Henderson
# Geng PTP
# Grupo Automático
# Jonathan Herrera Soto
# Julio Correa Estrada
# Kyle Richardson
# Lester Rosso
# Maya Perry
# Mike Tully
▸ Pancho Blood, Cumbias Rebejadas
# Rainstick
# Ros Knopov
# Samuel Reinhard
All Pib Slow Play was conceptualized and designed
by Giguel Maybach beginning in 2021. This website was
coded by Pancho Blood, and edited by Jeemin Shim.
This is an ongoing project and research will continue
to be gathered on the Arena channel Suena la Xumbia,
with occasional updates made here.
Thanks to Sandra Trigueros and her family, Geovanni
Barrios, Jacqueline Munno, Isabel Rooper, Pancho
Blood, and Kyle Richardson. The first volume of All
Pib Slow Play has been supported by the Yale
Sustainable Food Program, and Yale School of Art's
inaugural student-curated exhibition, No White Walls.
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