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The Wailing Man of Cusco (Peru)

from Plaza de Armas (Sonida de Sud America) by Paintings of Windows

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about

Another night in Cusco and we are drifting through the plazas back toward our hotel we were subjected to an astonishing caterwauling noise. People were stopping and staring about. Then up ahead outside the old Franciscan Cathedral I spotted an old man in an ancient dust grayed suit on his knees with a sign around his neck wailing. Tears were pouring down his distorted face. The volume was intense, a dog disturbed by the sound started to bark and howl at him from across the road and the old man responded in turn by wailing even louder. Great jagged sobs and moans and howls that drowned out the busy traffic and reverberated about the stone walls of the town. His ethnicity was hard to pick, he didn't necessarily look Peruvian, and I ultimately came to the conclusion that he must be a Butoh performer of some kind; that this was actually a truly staggering and powerful example of performance art. (Cusco is a strange city, very much on the international tourist map and such a performance not necessarily outside the bounds of the possible).
But it turned out that he was in fact a beggar who wailed outside the cathedral most evenings. I had left
my recorder at the hotel that night but a couple of nights later got a brief sample, albeit less intense, of ‘The Wailing Man of Cusco’. I gave him a handful of notes, obviously adequate for his subsequent needs as he immediately stopped wailing, put the money in his pocket, patted down his dusty pants and
wandered off into the crowd.

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from Plaza de Armas (Sonida de Sud America), released January 19, 2011
The Wailing Man of Cusco

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Antony Milton New Zealand

Antony Milton is a sound artist based in Masterton, New Zealand. He has been active in the underground and experimental music scenes since the early 1990s. He is also the curator of the PseudoArcana label.

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