The story of this duo goes back to 2019 when Guillermo Lares (Mito) and Shana (Comadre) met in Bogotá, hundreds of miles from their native Venezuela. Guillermo is the son of Oswaldo Lares, musicologist and founder of Fundalares, an organization that works to preserve Venezuela’s musical heritage, while Guillermo was responsible for the ArchivOlares, an organization created to preserve and share the riches and wisdom of a traditional Venezuelan music archive that Lares senior recorded on his travels around Venezuela between 1960 and 1980. Everything in the Lares household was connected with the country’s musical heritage so it was no wonder that Guillermo’s curiosity was aroused by various instruments, especially Afro-Venezuelan percussion.

Shana is a multidisciplinary artist, actress, model, singer and performer originally from Macuto in the north of Venezuela. In 2017 she migrated to Bogotá because of the crisis in Venezuela, and from the Colombian capital she has stayed in touch with her artistic creations not only in music but also dance and various humanitarian initiatives, resonating with her spirit of empathy for social struggles. In this duo, Shana embodies Comadre, a joyful, colorful, contemporary woman who takes strength from her roots to connect with tradition, with that feeling of closeness and familiarity that is lived on the coasts and in the villages. And it is precisely those places that make her voice a balm, recalling the home, dwelling amid the homesickness and the euphoria of carrying your roots with you to be recognized all over the world.

Both Guillermo and Shana have experienced migration in different forms, and this is why their joint project talks about this phenomenon explicitly in songs like “Guajirando” and “Noche de Vela” and implicitly in the character of a music that moves between regions, ancestral knowledge, cultures and cosmogonies that are part of the tradition of raizal (roots) peoples and the way in which the music has been their tool for documenting their reality.

So it is that Mito y Comadre establish a direct and constant communication with the territory, with displacement and the experience of being nourished by those places that have made a mark on the project, bringing together distant places, varied rhythms and unique characters who they have met along the way and who have inspired them to translate their stories into songs such as “Quichimba” and “Va a Ver.”

Guajirando is available on vinyl and on all digital platforms