In the Colombian Amazon, the Murui Muina people, also known as Uitoto, toast coca leaves, grind them into a fine green powder called mambe and take it with ambil, a paste made from tobacco, when they sit around the fire to talk through the business of the community. The leaf, they say, sweetens the word. That phrase, “endulzando la palabra”, turns up in “Mama Coca”, a song Waytamayu sing to coca as a mother and to tobacco as a father, asking one to tell them the truth and the other to clear their minds.

Behind the name, which joins the words for wild flower and river in Quechua, the indigenous language of the Andes, are Yari Bonilla, born in Peru, and Paula Katharina, who grew up in northern Germany. Since 2018 the couple have lived in a small community in southern Portugal, looking after a native forest, fruit trees and vegetable gardens between the ceremonies they lead. Yari has guided those gatherings since 2014, most of them around Wachuma, a cactus Andean healers have used in ritual for centuries. Paula paints as well as writing songs; she composed the music for “Mama Coca” and made the album’s artwork.

Waytamayu write their songs for the plant ceremonies they lead, for everyone present to sing, adding to the body of ceremonial chants known as medicine music. Like the icaros, the healing songs that Amazonian shamans sing in ceremony, they address plants directly, as living teachers. In “Mama Coca” the coca plant weaves people and the earth into one cloth, its leaves “tejiendo la humanidad”, weaving humanity together. Paula and Yari sing of doing the same work, patiently cleaning the cotton before it is spun so their thinking runs clear. By the end the whole song has narrowed to one line, “juntos vamos despertando, aquí y ahora recordando”: together we are waking up, remembering here and now.

Their two voices carry that line over Yari’s guitar and percussion. Around them, Tavo Vazquez plays two instruments from the folk music of the Andes, the mountain region where Yari grew up: the charango, a small, bright ten-string guitar, and the ronroco, a larger version with a deeper voice. Violin from Paulina Violina and bass guitar from Renzo Bonilla fill out the band.

Hear “Mama Coca” HERE and take Semilla Dorada home at a price of your choosing through THIS LINK