Year 5540 of the Andean calendar. Noa decides to escape from her native Guayaquil with her best friend, Nicole, to attend the ‘Ruido Solar’, a popular macro-festival that gathers thousands of young people -musicians, dancers, poets and shamans; for eight days and seven nights each year at the foot of one of the many volcanoes of the Andes.

Families and the violence of the cities are left behind. A hallucinated landscape unfolds ahead, trembling to the rhythm of music and volcanic eruptions under a meteorite-ridden sky.

For Noa this will be the first stop before reuniting with the father who abandoned her as a child and who now lives in the high forests, a territory where the disappeared also hide, those who once climbed to the ‘Ruido’ and never returned to their homes.

Driven by an extraordinary lyricism, a dazzling aesthetic and a brutal sense of rhythm, Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol is a great mystical journey into the primitive heart of music and dance. A lysergic and emotional journey that is at once a search for a father and a sense of belonging in a world that knows only loss and helplessness.

In this novel, Mónica Ojeda invites us to a retrofuturistic Andean festival in the mountains. Psychedelia, volcanoes, disintegration. And then there’s the language that bursts into flames, nothing is what it seems. Following her on this journey is, without a doubt, an intense experience. Mariana Enriquez  

It shocks and crashes into you. Every page is a membrane woven to be torn apart. Karina Sainz Borgo, ABC

Dazzling. Carlos Pardo, El País

Combining Andean cosmogonies and pop culture, this unique tale whispers in our ears a story whose intoxicating notes invite us to listen to the world around us in a different way. Laëtitia Favro, Le Magazine 

Although the worldbuilding is admirably subtle, the prose is as unrelenting as the BPM of hard techno, pounding at readers to lose themselves in the possibility of transcendence. Ryan Pierce, World Literature Today

The power of the novel lies in the beauty and skill of Ojeda’s language, which boils complex philosophical ideas down into short aphorisms and laces them together into flowing, poetic monologues reminiscent of the best of Virginia Woolf. Matthew Eatough, Ancillary Review of Books 

(…) literature is also this: delirium, the possibility, while getting lost in bliss, listening and the absence of meaning, which, nevertheless, illuminates new meanings, to open one’s eyes and see in a new way. Letras americanas – Emiliano Monge, El País

An exceptional lyricism and a cosmic ear that captures the most intimate vibrations of words. Silvina Fiera, Página 12, Argentina

Mónica Ojeda has written a captivating novel (…) brimming with poetry; her language is both a caress and a punch; tender and unsettling, it moves between raw realism and a dreamlike structure. Begoña Méndez, El Cultural

Her words flow, and—from synaesthesia to desire—the work grows, merges and fragments until it forms a lysergic perspective from within literature, born of the joyful intensity of exploring and dissecting life through writing. Guillermo Balbona, El Diario

This writer’s present is heading towards a fierce future. Ricardo Baixeras, El Periódico

A beautiful and disturbing text—turning humanity’s insides outside. Charlene Elsby, Reviews

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