In the Aymara language, TAYKALI means the «old woman», the elder, the ancestor. The name of the group TAYKALI is about the old knowledge and native wisdom that a shaman uses for healing rituals around the fire in the Native American culture. It is in the heart of living South American traditions that the album Sur Tierra finds its origin and inspiration. Each song is a prayer celebrating the holiness of nature, for the traditional doctors invoke the forces they need to heal people through music. In the Native cosmogony, a human being is considered a mirror of the whole universe. How could a man be healthy without the community honouring the body that supports every human being : our Mother Earth? May the wisdom of the traditional doctors of South America be heard, at least through the graceful melodies that go through them...

TAYKALI results from the meeting of two musicians from Peru, the guitarist Sergio Valdéos and the percussionist Cali Flores, long-time friends and colleagues, with the Swiss singer and journalist Laetitia Fontana. After several years of meeting the shamans who live in the Amazon basin and the Andean Cordillera, Laetitia has at her fingertips and in her voice a whole repertory of celebration songs in relation with the healing rituals and the cosmogony of the Native South American culture. Her dream is to offer an elegant musical suit to the melodies she collected around the fire. In February 2020, she presents her project to Sergio and Cali. It is already rumoured that a pandemic is invading the world. A very particular time begins when the three musicians start to record the so called “medicine songs” they chose to work on... Because of the circumstances, the album will be entirely homemade, each one to his house.

Laetitia sends a simple voice and guitar interpretation of each song to Sergio. On the basis of it, Sergio builds a rich weaving of guitars. Laetitia then adds the vocal harmonies and Cali goes on with percussion, flutes, charango... The result is Sur Tierra, a profound acoustic Metis album, in which rhythms from a wide variety of horizons (Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba... ) meet a voice tinted with soul and jazz. A sound to which the talented engineer Philippe Tessier du Cros will add his touch of poetry.