Daliyah is the solo artistic vessel of Bolivian (with roots in the Aymara indigenous people in the Andes)-Danish vocalist, classically-trained flutist, lyricist, and composer Flavia Huarachi Jørgensen. She has spent years navigating different musical worlds – from ceremonial and traditional folk music from her region in La Paz, Bolivia, to classical orchestral music, improvisation, and free jazz. She teaches performance at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC) in Copenhagen.
Distorción is the debut outcome of Huarachi Jørgensen and the outcome of her long-searching musical work. The album was inspired by her Aymara heritage, the body’s hidden languages, improvised folk melodies, and experimental and improvised composition. It uses music to process her personal history and for healing from violence and intergenerational trauma.
The album is structured as an acoustic, surreal, 13-song folk suite sung in Spanish, featuring an international cast of Lithuanian double bass player Aurelijus Užameckis, who collaborated with on the duo album Huellas (FootPrints, CRRNT, 2023), who also plays the kankle, the Lithuanian plucked string instrument, fellow Lithuanian on claps, Norwegian drummer-percussionist Simon Olderskog Albertsen, Polish sound artist Michal Biel on tape and field recordings, and a choir of Jasmin Mebrouk, Dunia H. Jørgensen, Sarra Esse, Kristi Alma Aspen, and Laura Zöschg. Huarachi Jørgensen employs these assorted voices, as well as her own voice and flute playing, as a sonic archivist, gathering raw materials to piece together a fractured sense of self. Distorción was recorded at RMC in Copenhagen between 2021 and 2025.
Huarachi Jørgensen sounds like a mysterious shaman conducting expressive and visceral, ancient purifying ceremonies, focused on the slow and chaotic work of reclaiming the self, and of exorcising troubling memories and ghosts from a dark, multicultural childhood, with the help of archetypal feminine shadows. The Distorción refers to a most intimate, painful memory («In my bedroom, / In a corner, all tangled up / I end up all distorted…»). But Huarachi Jørgensen, as Daliyah, finds comfort in her present: «…What shape will the act take to heal? / That of the one that remembers, forgives, / shifts movement, the one that laughs, / tends to a seed and transforms into a sun / and a moon».
Eyal Hareuveni
Flavia Huarachi Jørgensen (voice, flutes), Aurelijus Užameckis (double bass, kankles), Simon Olderskog Albertsen (drums, percussion), Michal Biel (tape, field recordings), Jasmin Mebrouk (vocals), Dunia H. Jørgensen (vocals), Sarra Esse (vocals), Kristi Alma Aspen (vocals), Laura Zöschg (vocals), Edvinas Grinkevicius (claps)
