As a result of more than 13 years of work, the álbum celebrates the mytic culture of the orishas while featuring names such as Tulipa Ruiz, Carlinhos Brown, Criolo, Anelis Assumpção, Lucas Santtana, Thalma de Freitas, Curumin and Rob Mazurek

A salutation to the orisha's culture, timeless key influence in the Brazilian music scenario, the album “Oríkì” (dobra discos/Altafonte) is also a mark on the artistic trajectory of Iara Rennó. With a unique afro-brazilian sonority (or sound?), the work is a wrap-up of more than 13 years of research, creation and production. The 13 songs off the album — 12 of them being new releases, since “Ave Leve” was recorded by Virgínia Rodrigues on the album “Cada Voz é Uma Mulher” — are dedicated to the most popular orishas in Brazil and were composed from ancient transcreations of the nagô tradition. The recordings started in 2009 at the iconic studio El Rocha, and have collaborations of names such as Tulipa Ruiz (in a new record of a song that precedes her debut album), Anelis Assumpção, Lucas Santtana, Curumin, Criolo, Carlinhos Brown and Thalma de Freitas.
Listen to Oríkì: links.altafonte.com/oriki
First part of a body of work composed by two sibling albums, “Oríkì” and “Ori Okàn”, the record had to own some new elements so it can finally be born into the world. With a musical language that combines traditional percussion and a jazzy-pop instrumentation, Iara’s highly anticipated album creates a bridge from tempos and synesthetic layers. There’s a mysterious atmosphere that enhances the listener’s perception so they can guess, through the rhythm and the characteristics description, which orisha is celebrated by the song — since in most of them the entity’s name isn’t explicitly cited. The idea of ​​the project came in 2009, when Iara, together with the architect and visual artist Silvana Olivieri, created a sound installation at the Afro Brasil Museum, entitled “Oríkì in Corpore“. The exhibition had 12 pieces, each one of them dedicated to an orisha that received a song back then. This process led to “Oríkì”, a phonographic work that remained unpublished and unfinished since then.
Some of the tracks have as lyrics the transcreations of the essayist Antonio Risério (published in his book "Oriki Orixá"), set to music by Iara. Other lyrics were originated from research on oriki, published by great experts of the theme, such as Babalorixá Sikiru Salami, originating the “neo-oriki” — contemporary poem in homage to the orishas. The second album — distinguished by sounding, aesthetic concept and approach to the subject — is complementary to the first and is due to release in 2023.

With art and music production by the singer, songwriter and poet, “Oríkì” has, alongside the traditional drums, a diversified electric instrumentation and a narrative of its own, proper of the oriki, to describe African gods. The second album, in turn, promises a more acoustic and intimate instrumentation, with songs that talk about the orishas’ universe in a more subjective way. In the group of excellent musicians who perform in “Oríkì”’s tracks, there are names such as Kiko Dinucci, Curumin, Maurício Badé, Guilherme Granado, Lucas Martins, Simone Sou, Marcelo Jeneci, Guilherme Held and Simone Julian.
Attending candomblé terreiros since 2007, in 2020 Iara’s artistic and personal paths made her dive into the initiation in candomblé. It was there, in the terreiro, where she conceived a new harvest of songs, in a mirrored action of creation and rebirth. The new songs were born connected with the dormant project, enhancing the relation of dialog and complementarity of the work. The material recorded in 2009 had its memory updated and recreated with the life that follows the recordings, bringing back the African oriki’s cultural heritage and their reverberations in Brazilian music. “Oríkì” thereby is a work trespassed by basis and fundaments which promote a cultural-historic recovery and a personal story, carrying objective and subjective symbolic values.

Oríkì by definition
Ori (head, fate, spirit, ancestral essence) and ki (from the verb salute). Oríkì means a Salutation to the Spirit.
“An Oríkì is, above anything else, a prayer, an evocation. An Oríkì is a prayer that bonds not only beautiful words, but also sentiments and senses, and that sometimes don’t turn out as they should, at the time we want they to, but only when they, the orikis, want. […] Everything is a motive to an oriki. We should practice it a lot, but never just being reasonable, because only the words from the heart know how to pray”.
Ana Maria Gonçalves, in Um Defeito de Cor.
The oriki came to Brazil through slave ships, carried in the bodies of the slaved Africans. As time passed by, the afrodescendants acquired new habits, abandoning old traditions and creating new ones — a natural process of adaptation in a new environment with new conditions of existence, and, in this process, its use as a daily life and social rite has been, sometimes, abandoned.
The oríkì were nevertheless preserved in the sacred realm, through the cultural-religious life of candomblé: the ancient oríkì of orishas have been repeated through generations. More recently the oríkì have been getting back their artistic-cultural value, being known as a “subterranean poetics”, that affects the space of creative writing in the New World. In Brazil, this appreciation starts in the 1960’s, supported by the first translations into Portuguese concieved by Síkírù Sàlámi, Sylvio Lamenha and Pierre Verger, with a gradative dissemination of oriki and “neo-oriki”, for example in Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil’s lyrics. It is, thus, essential that this resignification as cultural heritage of the African roots be on the agenda nowadays.
Even though the Yoruba, Banto and Jejê are the basis to what we call Brazilian culture — even beyond our music —, all of this expression has been marginalized and oppressed for centuries, victim of racism and religious prejudice. For this reason, there’s the need for this reaffirmation to be constant and also for taking the knowledge to a layperson, today and always. Besides the artistic creation, “Oríkì” and “Orí Okàn” are a symbol for memory, recall and history, which builds a bridge between then and now.