World Music

Ape Chimba is a multi-instrumental artist and vocalist of a New Era. He is a visionary with a voice that resonates across borders and time. His music is a live channeling of nomadic songs blending the primal with the divine.

I have been in love with making music since I was child. My journey begin with rhythm and drums though I am entirely self-taught. SO in love I was, in fact, that once I even ate a can of cat food in order to get my aunt to let me play her piano (It’s a long story, see the above video). I made my first drum set out of shoe boxes and pencils in my room because my father could not (or would not) buy me one.

Music saved my life. It has been a friend, a refuge, a teacher, and I know we can never be separated because my destiny is woven with hers.

I began singing almost by accident, though it was something I was always curious about. You see. . . I was in a hardcore metal band (haha! I know! It was an interesting chapter and I am quite proud of it). And, we didn’t have a main singer, or maybe he got sick, I cant quite remember. Anyways, the next in line, was me! I screamed all my anger into that microphone. And it was magic. All the injustice. All the frustration. All the people that had hurt me, all the rage I felt for life. I brought it to our music and to the stage. I think this time may have actually cleaned my voice…refined it, like  starting to polishing a diamond or something of the sort.

For a time, I learned from the songs of my ancestral roots, Flamenco. The beautiful and haunting longing, or “quejio” of my culture, lives and breathes deep in my bones. It was and is a channel to express deep sadness or longing and transform it into something beautiful. I began to play in the streets of Barcelona with a flamenco fusion band.

There came a time, many years later, when I decided that I did not want to be part of the music scene. I had played at this point in many bands in different ways. In big stages with thousands of people in the audience and, I got to know, what is known as the artist ego. . .mine, and that of those around me.  And I wanted nothing to do with it. I felt that the pure thread that connected me to music, was weak and it did not have room there in these scenes anymore. So, I just, stopped. It was around this same time that shamanic medicines came into my life. They changed me and my vision of music…I began to see what music really was about and for. My understanding of my voice, the songs of my soul, and the Universal soul, and the power music has to heal. . .all began to expand.

And carried me like a Canoe to where I am today. . .
People tell me my songs transcend borders and culture and time for them. I am not certain why this is but I have a sense that it is because I have begun to get to know the place in me that also transcends borders and time. That is from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Perhaps something like the chants of a cosmic nomad. . .belonging to no one place and yet belonging to the Infinite. Haha! A great paradox.”