'Agua Dulce' is a collaboration project by Berlin-based artists Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) and Laura Robles, and also the name of the most popular beach in Lima, Peru, near where both artists lived during their childhood, houses apart, without ever meeting one another! Years later, the pair joined forces with Robles on a self-built electric cajón and Cárdenas on electric guitar and electronics. Together, they explore rhythmical structures that form the backbone of the complex Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions – a broad term used for the various musical developments that occurred in the last two centuries at the shores of the Peruvian Pacific. Their music is a radical deconstruction of these rhythms focusing on the cajón, the Peruvian box drum that enslaved peoples made from fruit boxes when Spanish colonizers banned the more familiar foot drum in the 19th century. Synthesizers and electric guitar give their beats a nostalgic texture.
The Gurdian summarized: “There’s heart-thumping tension and catharsis as the musicians aim to reconnect the Peruvian percussion instrument with its slave roots”.
It's Peruvian music but not as you know it!

Concert in the context of Fête de la Musique, organized by AB in collaboration with the Embassy of Peru in Belgium & Art Chance.