Within the album’s most haunting passage, Jaar outlines the connection between the colonization of Chile and the Holy Land. (Chile can be dwelling to the world’s largest Palestinian diaspora exterior the Center East.) He compares the title of the Magdalena river, bestowed by Spanish colonist Rodrigo de Bastidas, to the traditional Jewish metropolis Magdala, later an Arab village referred to as al-Majdal which was destroyed and changed by the Israeli settlement of Migdal. Jaar highlights the significance—and brute power—of (re)naming:
You say that you simply’re by the Magdalena river.
And I communicate to you about Palestine.
Which is not Palestine.
And the Rio Grande is not Karacalí,
No, the river is not Karihuaña
It’s not Guacahayo.
Nevertheless it nonetheless is Guacahayo! It’s the river of tombs!
Does a spot change if you rename it? Does it develop into one thing else? These emotions of loss and confusion are underlined on one other spotlight, “Mi Viejita,” a memory on locations that may not be reached. These are individuals who depart their lives—one another, their farms, their livestock—to go to struggle for a colonial entity, solely to be oppressed by a army junta and a strict curfew that provides them no thanks in return, redefining the land they fought for as one thing that not belongs to them. The track’s emotional upheaval is soundtracked by a damaged beat that sounds virtually drunken, too gradual and staggered to face up straight, and chatter within the background solely enhances the chaotic environment.
The music behind the vocals on Piedras 1 is impressionistic and grayscale, with bursts of noise, barking canine, and synths that sound like offended elephants marking the themes of alienation and id in flux. Piedras 2, however, collects interstitial music from the radio play and veers from cerebral experimentation—just like the elegant, barely jazzy “Radio Chomio,” that includes the Mapuche artist Eli Wewentxu—to all-out membership mayhem, just like the closing “SSS” trilogy, which harks again to Jaar’s early days as a club-kid upstart. Solely now, the music is frantic and claustrophobic, as if making an attempt to interrupt out of its personal rhythmic constructions, a violent type of self-assertion.
Jaar has a manner with creating area and distance in music, which lends itself naturally to constructing narratives. Components like kick drums or voices typically sound like they’re coming from the following room over, till issues all of a sudden, briefly, snap into focus, a tool Jaar makes use of again and again to emphasise an important elements of Piedras. It helps the double album really feel slightly extra direct, a foil to Jaar’s regular aloofness.
