Briela Ojeda, "TEMPLO KOMODO"
The travel soundtrack you hope you'll never need to use
Colombia is a country of coasts and mountains. It has two coasts, one west and one east, separated by a mere 70 miles where the Central American isthmus rises like a plume of smoke into the billowing mass of North America. But its largest cities - namely, Medellín and Bogotá - are situated in the mountains, their buildings filling in the empty space between their slopes. The jagged terrain connecting these cities is as much a psychological barrier as a physical one, as I discovered in 2022 when my partner lost her passport in Medellín and we had to contemplate getting her back to Bogotá without the aid of a plane. Once you’ve fallen through one of the most dreaded chasms in the topography of travel, any remaining obstacles seem poised to drop you off the map entirely.
I don’t know if Briela Ojeda was still living in Bogotá while we were navigating our return, but she might as well have been there with us, in our Medellín apartment, soundtracking our situation with her 2021 record TEMPLO KOMODO. She’d start, of course, with the opener, a two-minute mix of devotional harmonies that swell with the ominous weight of a gathering misfortune. The somber blues of “Quesquequerés” and “Buhoz” would come next. Blues guitar had long been a tool for artists to trace the cracks in the ice that’s breaking under their feet, and Ojeda’s ice is particularly brittle. The whole set feels like it’s about to shatter just when the gentler opening chords of “Nariz Con Raíz” step in to save it.
In Medellín, we were saved by a notarized police report that allowed my partner to get on a plane to Bogotá without a passport. We touched down in the country’s capital at the beginning of a 4-day Colombian holiday. Almost immediately, the ice cracked again, and my partner fell ill with a flu that left her bedridden. We holed up in the private room of a hostel together to wait: for her fever to break, for the consulate to open, for our Covid tests to come back. Since this was 2022, we needed a negative Covid test taken within 24 hours of travel in order to enter the U.S. If this flu ended up being something more, we’d be waiting in Colombia for another two weeks, regardless of whether our passports were travel-ready.
As it turns out, the rest of TEMPLO KOMODO is pretty music for waiting. “Nariz Con Raíz” feels just light enough to keep you suspended, but not to take you anywhere in particular. It’s followed by the restless agitation of “Doña Justice,” the sepia-tinged calm of “Liviana,” and a title track heavy with the kind of tiredness that downtime accumulates as it stretches on to an uncertain horizon. The album ends with a two-minute mirror of the opener, the type of tidy closer one hopes life might offer when periods of waiting finally come to an end.
Our waiting period was thankfully short. We would leave Bogotá soon after my partner got her temporary passport, negative Covid tests in hand. Briela Ojeda, to my knowledge, is still somewhere on that valley floor. If you’re ever there, you should try to catch her live — particularly if you have some time to kill.
Bonus: I’ve been busy with some more U.S.-focused writing lately. Last month, Bandcamp Daily published a report I wrote on Oakland’s post-punk scene, and a few weeks later I had the chance to review Ty Segall’s latest album for the same publication. No real connection to TEMPLO KOMODO here, but still some great music that’s worth a listen.
