“Cuando voy a la montaña, voy a mí“, sings Ana María Vahos on “Nuevos Horizontes”: going to the mountain is going to herself, and to a home unlike anywhere else. The mountain she names is home to Horizontes, a village of 195 people at 2,250 metres in the hills northwest of Medellín, where the houses carry their owners’ names on the front instead of street numbers. Vahos’s parents and grandparents lived there, and Sebastián Gómez Agudelo shot the video between the village and Medellín, following her through the streets and among her family.
Born in San Pedro de los Milagros in 1993 and based in Medellín, Vahos writes and performs as a cantautora in a guitar-and-voice format, with the 2022 album Los Días behind her. She sings for El Búho, the recording name of Robin Perkins, who grew up in northern England, studied Latin American Studies in Glasgow, lived in Argentina and Mexico City, and started the label Shika Shika with Argentine producer Barrio Lindo in 2015.
“Nuevos Horizontes” is the second single from Hogar, out 18 September on Shika Shika, an album Perkins built around field recordings of his own home life, of travel, of islands and of long evenings with friends. Hogar comes down from Latin focus, the fire in the middle of the house. The word for a home started out naming the fire it was built around. He made the record while putting down roots in France for the first time, and Vahos sings about the opposite journey: home as the place you go back to. Perkins hosts a listening party for the album on 13 September.