- An album of celebratory and intimately personal house music informed by the musical and cultural traditions of the artist's Peruvian heritage.
- Sofia Kourtesis' music has grown more personal with every release. Between three dazzling EPs, a moving RA Session and enough critical acclaim to land her across all kinds of crossover publications' year end lists, the rising Peruvian born, Berlin-based musician and producer has become a bulwark of effusive house music. On the 2021 EP Fresia Magdalena, Kourtesis sang through the pain of her father's loss on songs like "La Perla" or "By Your Side." Her music is synonymous with Studio Barnhus, the Swedish label that originally signed her and helps define her sound: kaleidoscopic and buoyant. What sets her apart is the incorporation of Latin American rhythms and found sounds that create blissed-out atmospheres. On her debut album, Madres, Sofia Kourtesis takes this a step further, blending autobiographical sketches into a Latin house album that tugs at the heartstrings with its mix of dance floor rapture and personal liberation.
Madres is largely inspired by and dedicated to Kourtesis' relationship with her mother, as well as maternity of all kinds. As Kourtesis worked on the album, her mother battled and beat cancer, and as a result, the album became a playground for the celebration of such survival. The fluttery and hopeful "Vajkoczy" is named after the neurosurgeon who saved Kourtesis' mother's life. Horns flood through "Vajkoczy" triumphantly, like earnestly embracing the happy ending of a film and letting it wash over you. The title track is an alluring tropical house tune that teems with life at every corner. Seemingly narrated by a mother, it's filled with brightly textured synths and alluring adlibs. "Madres" is diasporic nostalgia personified. Its lyrics call for children to "vuelve a casa"—or return to their home—a theme Sofia Kourtesis has previously explored in her work ("Home Is Where I Can Dance"). Kourtesis' said that "my heart and my romanticism will always be Peruvian, but the power to move is always German." Instead of using a Peruvian figure like Sarita Colonia to drive the narrative, Kourtesis embeds her own feelings and family as a way of making the subject matter—and the music—her own.
Kourtesis developed her production chops living and working in Germany, but the pastel-hued music on Madres is defined by Peruvian soundscapes. The rallying anthem "Cecilia" is inspired by her parents' activism, particularly her mother's work protecting Peru's Indigenous tribes. "Cecilia" is coated with samples that reveal themselves in slivers, like peering into someone else's dreams and trying to make sense of its meaning. Other songs like, "El Carmen" or "Estacion Esperanza," are distinctly Latin American in both subject matter and sampling. The former utilizes Afro-Peruvian instruments like the cajón as well as field recordings from Kourtesis' time spent with Afro-Indigenous populations to build house tracks that sound like an overflowing celebration and homage to such communities. "Estacion Esperanza'' sounds like it could become the music of a movement, as it opens with a chant from a Peruvian protest against homophobia and builds into a lush arrangement of unity.
Throughout Madres, Sofia Kourtesis explores the many places and people she's found a home in. It's a boisterous, life-affirming record that successfully blends essential elements of dance floor house music with some of the more convivial markers of Peruvian and Latin American music and culture at large. This is most clear on the LP's centrepiece, "How Music Makes You Feel Better." With its pulsating drums and rolling beat, breathy vocals, Spanish samples and widescreen melody, the track encapsulates not only all the themes at work on Madres but the essence of Sofia Kourtesis' technicolour music as a whole: that authenticity and spirit will always move bodies, even in the face of difficulty.
Tracklist01. Madres
02. Si Te Portas Bonito
03. Vajkoczy
04. How Music Makes You Feel Better
05. Habla Con Ella
06. Funkhaus
07. Moving Houses
08. Estación Esperanza feat. Manu Chao
09. Cecilia
10. El Carmen