On December 6, 2025, we celebrated four years of Crafting the field by Xapiri Ground, a creative series of musical compositions that reflect upon the natural and social environments surrounding Indigenous culture and its contemporaries. Those who joined us for a roundtable discussion about the project were artists Christian Mun, Canto V. Engelhard, Agricultura Celeste, Ghosthorse, and myself, Melanie Dizon, who were all featured in this commemorative mix. The mix was compiled by Ghosthorse and performed live to celebrate the evening, along with live visuals by Marcelo Mellado.

"For me, the experience in the field was transformative." Canto V. Engelhard

Canto's titled work for series #08 ‘all that goes into this / nokemake / por eso el cuento coincide’ is a sonic landscape made with many hands. It tells of an immersion in Shipetiari, Matsigenka territory, together with Melanie, Jack and Davis from Xapiri Ground. As a way of decentering the domain of recording technologies, Canto shared their field recorders with the community in an effort to amplify a collective listening and hearing experience from which ancestral songs would surface and the interplay of children speaking in Matsigenka.

"I drew a great deal of inspiration from visual anthropology when creating this work, then I switched it to sound anthropology." Agricultura Celeste

Agricultura Celeste's composition for series #09 is a culmination of memory, sound, and the human bonds with the Yine of Monte Salvado. During his time with the community, he recounts the feeling that the people were returning to their memory, remembering themselves, and therefore creating their modern myth where the vindicating figure of their noble clay figure called Gayo had resurfaced.

"Here in Xapiri, we can enter into the history of both the visual and the auditory." Christian Mun

Christian was a former member of our team at Xapiri Ground whose contribution to the Crafting the Field series was not only to sound-mastering but to two compositions inspired by traditions of the Iskonawa and Awajún peoples. For series #05, he sculpted a soundscape that conceptually conveyed the relationship between the boa, the Iskonawa man, and the jungle with the voice of Elias Rodriguez Campos, an Iskonawa elder who shared the origin story of their people and also of their separation. And for series #11, he explored new forms of contemporary expression inspired by the recordings of "Anen" chants shared on behalf of Enrique Basurto Carvo from his project Awajun Nampag, highlighting some sonic attributes influenced by the Awajún culture.

"All this began by getting to know her family a little... through their ceramics." Ghosthorse

Carlos de la Cruz, known as Ghosthorse, crafted a composition for series #07 that wove the Shipibo-Konibo musical tradition with the historical present in collaboration with Korin Pino, Pekon Jisbe, and Sanken Yaká from the Masisea community in the Ucayali region. The Sandoval family are master ceramists whose songs express the story of their community, the wisdom that is contained behind their sacred 'Kene' designs projected onto their art and bodies, and their reverence for the nature that surrounds them.

"...it’s about how what I’ve produced can reach the community, I'm on that path of what the outcomes could be." Melanie Dizon

Since 2021, the team at Xapiri Ground and I have been working with the Matsigenka community of Shipetiari in the Manu Biosphere where we learned, shared and created in collaboration with the children and elders of the community. This piece for series #13 is dedicated to them. It sculpts a multi-layered landscape of sounds from real and imagined spaces, guiding us into the forest of the “Terira Ineenkani” or “the Unseen Ones,” reimagining an ancestral tale of anthropomorphism and the dream premonition told to us by David Ríos Rivera, who learned the story from his father when he was a young boy in 1973.

All compositions have been exhibited in the soundroom at the Xapiri Ground Amazonian art house and are available to listen to on our website and to purchase from our Bandcamp page.

We'd like to thank all the participating artists for this incredible series between 2021 and 2025 and for having opened up new opportunities for exploration into the sounding environments around us. Please stay tuned for what is to come and where this work continues to guide us.