Following a string of acclaimed collaborations, including Agua Dulce with percussionist Laura Robles
and Mapambazuko alongside Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta, Peruvian artist Alejandra Cárdenas
(aka Ale Hop) returns with her most personal work to date yet, A Body Like a Home. Marking her first
album under her birth name, the project is a sonic memoir exploring the tangled realms of trauma,
recovery, and love through autobiographical soundscapes.

A Body Like a Home is the artist at her most exposed. Comprising 13 songs and 15 poems, the album
sees her set aside collaborative fusions for solo catharsis, channeling years of turbulence -
intergenerational scars left by colonialism, racism, domestic violence, and alcoholism - into a work
that oscillates between brutality and tenderness. Cárdenas states:
“I grew up under Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, when a veil of hopelessness seemed to settle over
everything. This is the backdrop of the album. The songs and poems trace the inevitable loop
between private wounds - addiction, domestic violence, fractured intimacy - and Peru’s national scars,
carved by colonialism. It’s not a straight story or a resolution. Writing and composing became a ritual
of digging for meaning, into what’s buried, disguised, or renamed, until the body itself became a living
archive.”

At the heart of the album is Cárdenas’s own voice - part witness, part confessor - reciting over layers
of electric guitars, electronic textures, the haunting violin of Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes, and
a collage of field recordings, from rainfall, muffled whispers, broken glass, to archival protest footage
from Peru. The result is a work that resonates like a diary written in sound.

The first single, "Motherland", is a searing testimony where Cárdenas voice cracks under the weight
of history and personal loss. Amid a storm of distorted guitars, she traces the cyclical legacies of
colonialism, from state massacres branding Indigenous bodies as “terrorists” to the spiral of addiction
as an unavoidable future. The lyrics draw parallels between political and domestic violence: a
mother’s drunken knife pressed to her chest, and a motherland where racism is currency. She utters:
“sacrifice demands a body.” Yet, amid the wreckage, a willful grip on love and faith persists.
Ultimately, A Body Like a Home is a document of transformation. Tracks like "Evangelina" and the title
piece "A Body Like a Home" hold space for resilience, spirituality, and love, while "Early Road" and
"Going South" thread subtle nods to Peruvian folklore, opening up bright vignettes into a sense of
belonging.

The poetry chapbook accompanying A Body Like a Home (five of its pieces are also recited on the
album) extends the work, building a parallel architecture. Oscillating between the documentary and
the mythic, the intimate and the forensic, the profane and the oniric, these poems practice a theology
of the ordinary, where everyday objects - cameras, knives, moth-eaten cotton - are charged withspiritual and historical weight. Here, the body is land, house, battlefield, collective pain, geological
territory; and trauma is, in contrast, archival, cellular, ritualistic, inherited. Read alongside the music,
the stories refract across two mediums: songs give them breath and poems give them bone.[info sheet from distr.]