No sound is too potent for the trio of guitarist Ava Mendoza, violinist gabby fluke-mogul, and drummer Carolina Pérez. The three musicians, who each hail from a different corner of the experimental music world, strike their instruments with relentless fervor and a heavy dose of feedback. With their new album Mama Killa, named for the Inca goddess of the moon, simmering electric guitar whirrs beneath fiery violin melodies while pummeling drums vibrate through it all, taking notes from jazz, blues, folk, and metal. Released July 11 on burning ambulance, the album runs on sheer force, but its real magic lies in the details: how each song is in perpetual motion, propelled by the mix of each individual’s area of expertise.
The trio exists in a long lineage of cross-genre, experimental music supergroups. Take the combination of Wolf Eyes and Anthony Braxton or live performances by Yo La Tengo and The Sun Ra Arkestra, for example, or the work of organizations like Bang on a Can and the influence of minimalism writ large. Steered by the consonance and dissonance of cross-genre collaboration, these explorations can allow musicians to discover something new, together.
Mama Killa finds three musicians uniting their voices into one. Mendoza presents blazing electric guitar, which equally traverses jazz, blues, and rock; fluke-mogul highlights folk, experimental, and improvisatory violin; Pérez showcases her nonstop heavy metal drumming. Together, these elements make a propulsive language driven by attention to detail and a conversational approach to performance.
Change is the vessel by which this trio travels, and the most intriguing part of their music is its ability to remain flexible despite its hard-driving force. While they often play at a blistering pace, they’re just as quick to slow down or pause altogether. Melodies are often born from blues or folk-influenced riffs that tumble with ease, yet their edges are sharp, splintered, or frayed; drums grow from simple syncopations into thickets of overlapping patterns. The result is songs that are constantly flowing from one unexpected place to the next.
The music’s fluidity is largely possible because of the trio’s ease of communication. Though each musician has their own distinctive background, when combined, the music feels less like a mosaic and more like a true blend of voices, forms, and styles. Each riff flies off the last, jumping from one musician to the next. Mendoza and fluke-mogul are frequent collaborators, and here, their instruments are so in sync they become nearly indistinguishable. There’s also a keen patchwork of rhythm, often held down by the delicate back-and-forth between fluke-mogul’s violin and Pérez’s complex drum patterns, like on “Amazing Graces,” which zig zags between haunted violin tremolos and laid-back rhythms.
And while the trio’s genre influences remain palpable throughout, the most interesting moments come when they fracture. A track like “Trichocereus Pachanoi” strongly references different genres, with modal jazz mood-painting and sweltering sustained notes reminiscent of drone metal. But those influences are just a starting point as they become mutated through rough-hewn phrases. Elsewhere, “Partera Party” builds from fluke-mogul’s folk- and blues-influenced violin melodies, which sing with melancholy underneath distortion and gradually dissolve into something unrecognizable.
By the end of most tracks, genre has been tossed to the wayside in favor of a chaotic swarm. Nowhere is this more clear than on the closer, “Mama Coca,” which synthesizes the trio’s language into one final rush. The song opens with the surprising quietude of distant cymbal taps and a couple violin filaments. As it grows, each part becomes more elaborate; drums add more rhythms, guitar adds more effects, violin bow strokes get longer and fiercer. By the end, it has fully erupted like a volcano, spewing gray ash into the air and magma onto the ground. Mama Killa shows that no genre is set in stone — instead, it’s meant to be pulled apart, reimagined, and rebuilt.
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