Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

Ojeda (Jawbone) delivers an intense and remarkable polyphonic hymn to the consoling and destructive power of music. Two friends, teen girls Nicole and Noa, leave their violent home city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, to attend Solar Noise, a weeklong “post-Andean” experimental music festival of “ancestral thrash retrofuturism” at the base of a remote and active volcano. There they meet other festivalgoers, including a pregnant former conservatory musician who expounds on art’s dark side (“To make music, you have to learn to love death”), a rhapsodizing figure known as the Poet, and a group called the Songstresses, “speleologists bringing to light the hidden, epiphanic shape of the world.” Also roaming about the festival grounds are Diablumas, “anarcho-primitivist” worshippers of experimental music who wear two-faced masks and recruit adherents to their cult. Amid the riotous dancing, sex, psychedelic drugs, and “mosh-pit inferno,” Noa taps into the rumbling landscape’s subterranean energies and discovers a new otherworldly voice (“the lightning’s voice, the mare’s voice”). After the festival ends, Noa visits her father, who abandoned his family following a nervous breakdown, and the two warily circle each other as Diablumas prowl about with their eyes, and ears, on Noa. As she and others make oracular pronouncements about music, life, and death (the Songstresses: “Fire is instinct, it is a song without time and fire is delirium”), the novel accrues a strange beauty and an entrancing Dionysian beat. It’s impossible to resist. (May)