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The silence lasts very little near Federico Galvis. Just a few seconds after observing the only two ducks playing in the Teusacá Lagoon, in the Páramo de El Verjón, the singer-songwriter known as Maréh He turns to talk about torrent ducks: “Did you know that they always go in pairs and that all they do is swim against the current? Once they reach the top of the river they let themselves fall. That is their plan.” He smiles shyly as he shares out loud part of the permanent murmur in his head. There is no silence. “Tell me if they don’t deserve a song,” he insists. Surprise, percussion and the mix of everything he learns has marked the musical career of this 32-year-old anthropologist from Cali. His latest album, Land of promisesis a tribute to the ecosystems of Colombia and also a handful of love songs: “Naming the territory is a political act; just as singing about love is.”
Moor, tropical forest, plain, river or mangrove. In this album of 11 songs, he reviews one by one the territories of the second most biodiverse country in the world. Colombia is the queen of birds and orchids and one of the nations with the greatest wealth of plants, amphibians and butterflies. Some of these animals, such as the cricket, the harlequin frog or the burrowing bird and the batará cackle are part of the chorus of Singinga song inspired by the song Força Estranha, by Caetano Veloso. “I asked myself why I sing. And nature has always been part of my childhood and my life, so I wanted to approach it without romanticizing it.
Galvis is a young singer-songwriter with an old soul. Son of Jorge Enrique Galvis, a philosopher, and Janice Patiño, a social worker and gardener, he began making music at the age of 9 and has always been closely linked to the culture of percussion and music of the Colombian Pacific. He says he was lucky enough to learn from great drummers in the country and musicians such as maestro Gualajo, Hugo Candelario, Magin Díaz and Petrona Martínez. While studying Anthropology at the Icesi University, he co-founded Africali, a musical project that ended up becoming one of the most eclectic and well-known bands in the city. “I would have loved to study ethnomusicology,” he admits. “But I don’t really care about terminology anymore, and neither does the academy. Music has the capacity to investigate and explore everything I wanted.”
The two main driving forces behind this album have nothing and everything to do with each other: his grandfather and the national strike in Colombia. Although he never met him, Galvis grew up listening to stories about his grandfather, Hernando Patiño Cruz, one of the pioneers of agroecology in the region. His grandson says that he “landed the most social lessons in the natural sciences; he always went further.” Together with his wife, Gail, they classified all the butterflies in the Cauca Valley, founded the ecology department in Colombia and was largely responsible for the domestication of the lulo and other endemic fruits. The national strike crystallized in Maréh a love for the country similar to Patiño’s. However, nothing in his lyrics seems to have a trace of it. “I am not a big fan of those who turn their art into a discourse. It is much more powerful to make criticism from what is not so obvious or so explicit.”
Cali, the epicenter of these Colombian protests, was the scene of a generation of young people who prioritized their demands rather than going through the third peak of the pandemic, in April 2021. According to the report of the Attorney General’s Office, since the beginning of the protests, 42 people lost their lives, a figure lower than that estimated by the country’s social organizations. Music played a very important role in the mobilization of youth. “There was a lot of indignation and many musicians who focused on activism,” he recalls. “The way it manifested itself in me was realizing everything that this country does have, seeing it and celebrating it.”
In the El Verjón moor, located half an hour from Bogotá, the fog comes and goes, revealing only a few seconds of a row of flowering frailejones, only to cover everything again. Maréh, sitting in front of the sacred lagoon, warms his hands so he can play some of his new songs on his guitar, which range from a dedication to his grandmother Gail, to the memory of a couple of friends who died in the river, or to the strength of his mother. He has only just returned from a tour in Mexico two days ago and admits to being exhausted. “I knew that coming to the moor would do me good. Nature has always had a lot of power over me and what I do. This album also has a lot to do with remembering. Remembering walks with my family or at school.”
Land of promises The project was carried out thanks to a crowdfunding process that involved more than twenty people in the creation of content and merchandising for the pre-sale: from jackets with a QR code to listen to the birdsong of Colombia, to paintings by Pedro Alcántara or bird watching. “Promises for musicians are hard to keep in the country. It is very difficult to make a living from this and you have to invent everything to get started,” he laments. Galvis is a musician, manager, community manager… A few days ago he lost all the royalties he earned in Mexico when he accidentally bought more than 300,000 miles for Avianca flights. “I am looking for ways to recover the money, I feel very helpless. I needed that money to pay debts, it wasn’t even to treat myself,” he says. “Sometimes it is frustrating to put in so much effort and realize that things take a slower pace than you would like. I am learning to be calm in the face of uncertainty.”
Another collateral damage of this career is mental health. “The issue of being in the public eye is very heavy,” he admits. “I have suffered many times because it is very difficult not to fall into that trap. I also do a lot of work to differentiate success from recognition. That helps me a lot to find my bearings.”
Despite the difficulties, he chose the name of the album because of a solid commitment to hope: “There is no art that is not already calling for a people to come. But the future is not like a future of history, not even utopian, but like an infinite now, like a becoming. That is what I sing about.” Inspired by Rosalía, Jorge Drexler and Hugo Candelario, Among others, Maréh is obsessed with making this project “something bigger.” Among all the ideas he has, he is creating an interactive book with a app for mobile devices that experiences augmented and interactive reality to delve deeper into the connection with the earth and ecosystems. The protagonist will be a girl who discovers these environments one by one, around a story and a search, which advances through the sounds of the jungle, the forest, the plain or the moor. “I don’t want to be an ambassador for my country’s ecosystems, or even represent it. It’s enough for me to tell it and sing it.”
