Kanaku y El Tigre

The processions through the old streets of Lima’s district of Chorrillos, which surrounds the Pacific Ocean, mingled with the still vivid memories of a cold Canada and the discovery of an indie movement that was foreign to Nicolás Saba Salem, singer of the Peruvian band Kanaku y el Tigre. The drums of these processions sounded like elephants, and the languor of the wind instruments reminded him of the melancholic atmosphere of Sundays in the city. Even these sounds, which existed before him, were unfamiliar. But there was a connection between Toronto and Lima. Those processional marches combined in spirit with the Anglo-French folk he had heard in a city much farther north. The year was 2009. The journey: from Canada to Peru. A distance of almost eight thousand kilometers. A year after reuniting with Lima and a culture that he now began to perceive with other senses and therefore reinterpret with other sounds, he began to build “Caracoles” (2010), not only the band’s first album, but also the materialization of everything he had learned and absorbed in his youth and adolescence.