Alejandra Cárdenas: A Body Like a Home

A conversation with the Peruvian-born, Berlin-based artist about colonial scars and embracing sobriety

Alejandra Cárdenas is as an experimental guitarist and composer, who’s been recording and performing under the moniker Ale Hop for more than a decade, presenting her work at festivals and institutions across the world.

Raised in Lima’s underground music scene in the 2000s, Cárdenas first moved to New York and then in 2015 to Berlin, where she’s built another career lane as an academic researcher, publisher and curator of the editorial platform Contingent Sounds.

In the last few years, Cárdenas became an avid collaborator, working with percussionist Laura Robles on the acclaimed album Agua Dulce (Buh Records, 2023), and with Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta on the similarly lauded Mapambazuko (Nyege Nyege Tapes, 2025).

She’s now released her most personal work to date, the first album under her birth name, A Body Like a Home, dubbed “a sonic memoir exploring the tangled realms of trauma, recovery, and love through autobiographical soundscapes.”

In the press release, Cárdenas is quoted:

“I grew up under Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, when a veil of hopelessness seemed to settle over everything. This is the backdrop of the album. The songs and poems trace the inevitable loop between private wounds – addiction, domestic violence, fractured intimacy – and Peru’s national scars, carved by colonialism. It’s not a straight story or a resolution. Writing and composing became a ritual of digging for meaning, into what’s buried, disguised, or renamed, until the body itself became a living archive.”

The diaristic pieces see Cárdenas recite verses of poetry over layers of electric guitar, electronic textures, nods to Peruvian folklore, haunting violin (courtesy of Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes) and a collage of field recordings from rainfall, whispers, broken glass and archival protest footage from Peru.

The album is accompanied by a poetry chapbook that extends the work into “a theology of the ordinary, where everyday objects – cameras, knives, moth-eaten cotton – are charged with spiritual and historical weight. Here, the body is land, house, battlefield, collective pain, geological territory; and trauma is, in contrast, archival, cellular, ritualistic, inherited. Read alongside the music, the stories refract across two mediums: songs give them breath and poems give them bone.”

I spoke to Cárdenas about growing up among tear gas clouds and shattered glass, as well as finding home in your relationships to people and things.

all photos: Raul García Pereira

This is the first record you’re releasing under your given name. What prompted that decision to move away from the established alias Ale Hop?

I never liked my artist name because I didn’t choose it. A million years ago, I was playing with this band in Lima. I was very young, and I was the last to enter the band. They all had funny names, so I needed a funny name too. That guy in the band, when he printed the CD, he just put Ale Hop because he felt like it. I was like, “Okay cool, whatever.” But then it stuck with me.

Later I was in another band with this other guy, we were together at the time, and then he committed suicide, so I kept the name out of sadness. When I moved to Berlin, someone else here had a very similar name, so I kept my artist name again. But I was already so fed up with it, and when this record came together, I thought: If I don’t change my name for this record, I will never do it. It makes a lot of sense too, because it’s like a memoir.

What are some of the sounds you remember from your childhood in Peru?

I grew up in a lower middle class district, quite a noisy area with a lot of traffic. There was war and armed conflict going on, so what really influenced me was this notion that something would explode at any given time – it was just a constant, very present feeling I had. At some point, my mother gave me tape for the windows [so the glass wouldn’t split in case of an explosion]. And then, two blocks from our house, a bank actually exploded. That was a very normal thing. Two or three times per week we’d have no electricity because of an explosion in the city. On the other hand, Lima can be really beautiful too. It has the ocean. It’s a city of contrasts.

What role did music play in your household?

It was important. My parents were divorced, and I lived with my mother who studied piano. Whenever the electricity was out, people would bring out guitars, and they’d play traditional folk music. So there was a piano in the house, and I was always playing. I wanted to play drums, but they were expensive. I had no money and no one would buy me drums, so I got a guitar instead. I went to my first concert when I was 13, and there were 200 guys and maybe five girls. Soon I had my own band. I played in several other bands in the punk scene in Lima. They were all really bad. I never thought about it as a career until a few years ago.

What were some of your musical influences back then?

I was really into rock and post-rock. I listened to a lot of Sonic Youth when I was an adolescent, before I got into weirder, more abstract, more electronic things.

How and why did you leave Peru?

In 2012, I recorded my first couple of solo songs and applied to the Red Bull Music Academy in New York. I got accepted, which made me realize I could actually turn this into some sort of career and play abroad to get out of Peru. Because there wasn’t really such a thing as an experimental music scene in Lima, and the opportunities to play were very marginal. I’ve seen so many talented people give up because of that.

So you went to New York for two years and then moved to Berlin in 2015, right?

Yeah. To get a visa, I applied to the University of Arts, and I did a program there called Sound Studies. At first I just did it for the visa, but I ended up enjoying it very much. I also reconnected with some people from the experimental music scene that I already knew because they had played in Lima before, but they were from here. In this scene you will find your people quickly, friends of friends will tell you that you need to meet this or that person, and so on. It was pretty easy actually.

Ever since you’ve been juggling your artistic practice with an academic career. How’s that been going?

Well, I studied art history, and I was going to do cultural studies here, but then I enrolled in sound studies and did a lot of research about experimental music from Latin America. I was quite shocked about how little is known about it. Now I’m running this editorial platform [Contingent Sounds], and I have been publishing some books, and I have more more books coming out from people that I admire. I always thought my academic career would support me, and my music would be more of a hobby, but now I’m paying for the editorial work with the money I make from playing live shows. It’s actually pretty funny.

Who’s a Latin American woman composer that influenced you?

I grew up not knowing that these people exist because I didn’t have proper music education. But I love Beatriz Ferreyra’s music. She’s been a late influence for me, and I was able to catch a concert or two in the last few years. So I’ve been digging more into this [the work of Latin American women composers], and I’ve connected with people who are also interested in that, like feminist academics. I feel that Latin music has always been quite prominent in pop music. Back in the days you’d have salsa, and today’s equivalent would be someone like Bad Bunny. But a lot of experimental DJs and producers are getting a bit of attention now too. Not just in pop culture or dance music, but even in the more academic field or in electronic music and everything that’s in between, which is what I’m mainly interested in.

Tell me about the genesis of the new album A Body Like a Home. How did it evolve?

The inception came around 2019 with this childhood memory of thinking that something was going to explode. For some reason I began punching my guitar during live shows, making it sound like an explosion too, like I was looking for something in the guitar. I began playing it on my knees. I was feeling really vulnerable at the time. I’d stopped drinking, and went to AA. The reason that it took me so long to record this album was that I felt my style didn’t translate well to recording. When I play live, I can sustain the experience with my presence. In a concert, you can be really loud and really silent, and it will sound amazing. But those extreme dynamics don’t often happen on records, because that might sound like a mistake. It took me a while to figure out that the thing that could translate this was the text.

So the music was there first, and the poetry came afterwards?

The music was there, the drones and noise, a bit of folklore. But at some point I figured out, why don’t I just say what I want to say very directly – with words? Just actually say it, you know?

The lyrics are obviously very personal, biographical and political at the same time. There’s a song called “Tear Gas Clouds”, and there are verses and metaphors alluding to childhood trauma and domestic violence.

I wanted to write about this period of time, the 1980s and 1990s in Lima, but I also realized that I didn’t want to make a record about that armed conflict, because the most affected people were the indigenous people. So this couldn’t be the theme of my record, but I wanted that experience of hopelessness to be the center, and to get to that, I had to navigate my personal experience. Without these different levels, it would be banal. I wanted to connect with the history of my country and this bigger history of colonialism. These things are happening all the time – it’s neverending. It’s a well-known fact that societies that have been colonized have very high rates of alcoholism, for example.

You mentioned that you were embracing sobriety when you started working on this record. In the lyrics, you are talking about experiences you had in your family related to alcoholism, especially with your mother.

It’s all related to that. A psychologist once told me that two out of three people whose parents are addicts become addicts themselves. I’ll never forget that. I felt like my destiny was already written. It took me a while to figure out that there’s also one person that doesn’t become an addict, so you can also escape.

On the record, you’re talking about the scars left by colonialism, but you’re doing it in the language of the colonizer. This morning, I read an interview with the artist billy woods, and this sentence really stuck with me: “The English language is violence.”

I do understand that. Nevertheless, I wanted people to understand what I’m saying. I’ve been living here in Berlin for ten years, and I’m not going to write in German, but I’m also alienated and detached from my country, and it’s not like the Spanish language isn’t violence. Just an example, people who have an indigenous accent when they speak Spanish get discriminated against in Peru. People get rid of their accent when they come to the city, otherwise they cannot get a job. So I’d say Spanish is also a kind of violence, but it’s my mother tongue. I grew up with the language of the colonizer, so now I’m just using any language that can serve the purpose.

After ten years of living here, what’s your relation to the idea of home? Can a body really be a home?

The name of the record came to me all of a sudden when I finished the song “Motherland”, the most visceral song on the album. But there’s another song called “Evangelina”, which is about this woman that miraculously survived a landslide. People were so fascinated with her in Peru, she was in the newspaper every day. Originally it was the final song on the record, but then I wrote another song about love and transcendence, about finding home in the things you love and the people around you, your daily life and relations. In the end, this is all we really have.

Alejandra Cárdenas’ album A Body Like a Home is out now on Other People.