Los Angeles-based anti-disciplinary artist Dorian Wood is well known for creating work that pushes against tradition and challenges systems of marginalization. Over the years, moving fluidly between performance, composition, film, and visual art, she has built a reputation for powerful community-centred projects. Today she is announcing one of her most ambitious releases yet, Canto de Todes, which translates to “Song of Everyone”, and is inspired by a lyric from Chilean songwriter Violeta Parra, reflecting the project’s emphasis on community, ancestry, and music as a force for social change. The work also honours Wood’s Costa Rican-Nicaraguan roots and her family’s experience in the United States.
Releasing on May 1st through New Amsterdam Records, the album is a 70-minute distillation of Wood’s sprawling 12-hour composition and installation of the same name. Originally conceived as a three-movement work, and rooted in the idea of music as a shared communal force, the full version includes two hour-long chamber sections and a 10-hour multi-channel piece designed to unfold across different parts of a venue, immersing listeners in sound over time and space. The recorded version gathers music from all three movements, reshaped into a focused and richly layered album experience. Blending chamber classical, folk, torch song, and experimental elements, Canto de Todes centres on Wood’s powerful voice alongside cello quartet, guitar, and exploratory vocal arrangements. The forthcoming album also captures what Wood calls the “fifth mutation” of the project, as the work has been designed to transform with every presentation, incorporating local collaborators and new elements each time. Wood explains:
“I created this project with the freedom to mutate as it went along. Every presentation is custom-modified for each institution, and counts on collaborations with local artists of all mediums, whose respective interactions are permanently incorporated into the body of this evolving piece. By the fifth iteration we had this version that I wanted to commit to recording that takes elements from what Canto De Todes has been evolving into.”
She adds:
“I’m a firm believer in the strength that we can derive communally through celebration. When I say ‘we’ I refer to the People of the Global Majority—those who are not obsessed with being of a privileged class. I would love for us of the Global Majority to remember who we are and imagine the massive street party that we are capable of throwing. Every single protest, street party, rally, and manifestation, is us coming together in anger, frustration, and celebration to keep us going.”
Alongside the album announcement, Wood is also sharing the utterly stunning and moving lead single, “Girasoles”, a song channeling collective strength and resistance. “Girasoles is an accumulation of all this ancestral energy which is coming out into the streets to pick a fight,” says Wood. The single comes paired with a self-directed video built from more than 300 archival family photographs. About the video, Wood explains:
“The “Girasoles” video is a journey through my family’s generational resilience. Over 300 photos date back to our origins in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, bringing us into the present as proud, fearless babies holding our own in the shitstorm that is the United States. The song is a joyful ‘fuck you’ to fascism, to gentrification, to all forms of age-old governmental oppression. I felt it aligned with the mighty ancestral endurance so many of us have been carved from.”
Watch the video below.
