Parias Ensemble – Encore

This new chapter of Parias Ensemble—Daniel Reyes Llinás and myself, Luis Ianes—took place in Paris, France, in early autumn 2024.

Daniel traveled from Portland, Oregon, where he currently resides, to meet me here in Paris, where I have been living since 2020. During his stay, I introduced him to fellow Paris’ musicians Nicolas Souchal (France) and Dario Nitti (Italy). Together, we played and recorded a series of compositions and improvisations for four acoustic instruments.

As always, the starting point was a set of contrasting, non-linear, and concomitant ideas, including: The influence of the late Colombian guitarist and composer Ernesto “Teto” Ocampo, Tempo, the beautiful essay by Italian physicist Guido Tonelli and a couple of my own compositions based on “horticulture” reflections.

Parias Ensemble is an ongoing project led by Daniel Reyes Llinás and Luis Ianes since 2006. The group was formed while living in New York City in the 2000s. The initial idea was to create an ensemble that would allow us to play, write, and improvise our own music.

From the beginning, we felt that our musical identity was fragmented, complex, and scattered across different genres, traditions, and styles. Even within a scene as rich as New York’s at the time, we did not fit neatly into a one-dimensional musical definition or “business” label: too avant- garde for the jazz scene, too jazz and too strange for the Latin music scene, too improvised to be called composers, and too composed to be called improvisers.

That tension led us to name the project Parias—pariah in Spanish, referencing the lowest caste in India, those avoided or excluded by other social groups—and Ensemble, because from the start it has been a collective adventure shared with a long list of musician-friends and kindred pariah spirits, including Claire Cowan, Valérie Kuhne, Mariel Roberts, Vasko Dukovski, Frantz Loriot, Alexi David, John O’Brien, Pascal Niggenkemper, Emilio Teubal, Brett Sroka, Marta Topferová, Jessica Pavone, Miguel Malla, Iván Barenboim, Aleksandar Petrov, and many others.

By force—or by the very nature of the project itself—Parias has remained an open experience. Its shifting formations and the particular aesthetic interests of its members over the years have continuously shaped the direction of the music. Improvised and written material coexist alongside acoustic and electronic sound elements, as well as literary, philosophical, and geographical references, always drifting toward the outskirts, fringes, and boundaries.
This nontraditional approach to creation can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because there is nothing to cling to, nothing to fear, honor, or protect—we are outcasts, and therefore free. And a curse, because life on the margins of the music world carries its own inconveniences and discomforts. Yet it is precisely within this friction that we have always found the force—and the joy—of making music together.