QOQEQA
QOQEQA is the current music alias of Daniel Valle-Riestra, one of Peruʼs most groundbreaking musicians of its current generation.
Danielʼs sonic journey has shifted over time from melody - to percussion-driven and expanded its imagined borders from the Peruvian highlands into the African wetlands.
These cross-pollinations began when Daniel partnered up in his late teens with singer and musician Andrea Campos to form the duo Animal Chuki in the first stages of the 2010s, coinciding with the digital cumbia explosion in their home country. While much younger than their scenic peers, Animal Chuki cast a light on its own by proposing a very original take on Andean music, warped into the future through the skilled use of synth pads and a unique feel for engaging melodies. Animal Chuki bid farewell to a steeply growing fanbase after two successful world tours and once the lights were out Daniel found a renewed inspiration while standing in the dark.
With QOQEQA, Daniel presents a fully matured project that digs all the more subtly into his own cultural heritage and at the same time focuses its attention on polyrhythmics and the notion of creating melodies through percussion, an idea which is a leitmotif in many expressions of African music, to which Daniel is no stranger, not only via his recent musical tastes but also through his approximations with West African drums- unique elements of the Yoruba culture that found a home overseas on the shores of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Antilles. A delicate interplay of light and shade, QOQEQA is a journey into the dark which rewards the listener with flashes of refracting light oscillating at any color frequency the imagination takes us to.