Behind The Tracks: Proyecto Escapulario - Cuasrán (Single) (2026)

For Proyecto Escapulario founder Ariel Maniki, the Costa Rican band’s latest single ‘Cuasrán’ began not simply with the story of its title character, but with an experience of place.

Maniki had long admired the arts, crafts and traditions of the Boruca, an Indigenous people of southern Costa Rica whose culture has maintained a strong connection with their ancestral territory and the natural world. But it was during a recent visit to the Boruca community that the idea for ‘Cuasrán’ began to take shape. Experiencing what he describes as the community's deep respect for and connection with nature had a profound effect on him and became the foundation of the song.

At its centre is the eponymous Cuasrán, an important figure in Boruca tradition. Remembered as a warrior and leader who resisted the Spanish advance, Cuasrán refused baptism and retreated into the mountains rather than submit. Tradition holds that he remains there as a protector of the Boruca people and their beliefs, associated with the forces of nature and weather, and sometimes returning during the traditional Juego de los Diablitos celebrations.

Rather than attempting to narrate that history literally, Maniki used Cuasrán as a thread running through his own experience of Boruca. In the band's description of the song, the figure becomes a guardian of natural forces and a symbol of transformation, leading through the landscape, collective spirit, and ritual vitality of Boruca. The song is therefore as much about visiting the community and encountering a living culture as it is about the figure whose name it bears.

That distinction can also be heard in the lyrics. Images of mountains, fruit and fertility, the Térraba River, fire, rain, lightning and thunder place Cuasrán within the landscape rather than separating him from it. Transformation recurs throughout the song, while the refrain, “Solo asciende lo que pertenece al cielo” (“Only that which belongs to the sky ascends”), gives the natural and spiritual imagery a recurring focal point. Musically, ‘Cuasrán’ belongs to the broader direction Maniki has been developing with Proyecto Escapulario: an intersection of alternative rock with traditional Latin American influences. The project grew out of his return to writing in his native Spanish and a renewed engagement with his Latin American heritage, explored on the 2025 debut album Algo En La Sangre through influences including bolero, son, guajira, tambito, danzón and cumbia.

Maniki wrote the music and lyrics for ‘Cuasrán’, with the arrangement developed by Proyecto Escapulario. Alongside Noe Urtecho on guitar, Daniel Kohkemper on bass, Erick Nassar on keyboards, Jorge Durán on drums and Birley Rivera on backing vocals, the recording features guest violinist Milette Porras, whose mournful lead lines provide one of the song's most distinctive instrumental voices. Maniki handled production, recording and mixing at Media Luna Estudio. The project's current live line-up also regularly features Alex Segura on trombone and percussion, who also appears on the previous single, ‘Resplandor’, further expanding the instrumental palette around the core band.

The result is less a musical retelling of the Cuasrán legend than a song about the relationship between story, landscape and living culture. For Maniki, the figure of Cuasrán provided a way into what had affected him most strongly during his visit: a sense that the ancestral and the present remain intertwined, and that the natural world is not merely the setting for those traditions, but an active part of them.

‘Cuasrán’ also continues the work Proyecto Escapulario began with Algo En La Sangre and, more recently, ‘Resplandor’. It forms part of a new body of material currently being developed towards the project's next album.

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