PRICE:
$15.50
LOW STOCK LEVEL
1-2 Weeks
ARTIST
TITLE
Syzygy
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
HEMK 032CD HEMK 032CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
10/15/2013

For her follow-up album to 2012's Commotus (HEM 019CD/LP), Lucrecia Dalt treats listeners to a perilously brief, intricately conceived meditation. At times rich and cinematic, and at other times, delicate and fragile, Syzygy is a journey into a kind of Ursprung of beautiful distress. Another stylistic leap for Dalt, Syzygy eschews her quietly textured, bass-guitar-driven method of song craft for a more direct approach to production. Syzygy furthers her previous album's raison d'être, being never simply easy to get, but never forbidding or inaccessible. Composed in a whirling interstitial moment between Barcelona and her recent relocation to Berlin, Syzygy brims with uncertainty and suspense. Fluttering arpeggios, unexpected bursts of tone, surrealistic tropical interludes, and deep, contrapuntal sub-bass drones are the language of Syzygy. It's hard not to make a comparison to the zoo of elementary particles, or a space age sound library; Except the album advances forward with such inexorable cohesiveness that its brevity comes as the most electric shock of all. Dalt's trilingual vocals (Spanish, English, Catalan) ride the edge between psychological drama and philosophical reverie, swirling complex themes sourced from texts by Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino and films by Antonioni and Bergman, into a freeform confessional fabric. Dalt let these classic films run straight through while she worked on the album, allowing the films' sudden changes of mood and tempo to push her music in new directions, as if these cinematic moments were simply stems in the mix. The end result is a listen more tempting, and yet more mystifying than ever. Syzygy encourages repeat listens and addictive contemplation, and represents Dalt's most definitive statement yet. Cover image by Tonje Thilesen.