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LP
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CO 005LP
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2015 release. Along the arc of Lucrecia Dalt's music, beyond what steers her so allusively away from self-repetition, there is an undefinable forward inertia. What can explain, for instance, the near absence of her voice? Is it personal interest, renunciation, an embrace? Is she driven by a backdrop of conceptualism, or is this a lyrical wandering? What is known, for starters, is that she made Ou immersed in a cinema of her own, curatorial creation. Ou's filmic quality is a direct consequence of her turning her studio into a screening room for classic works of new German cinema, pulling influence from directors such as Helke Sander and Werner Schroeter. As she works, she absorbs, and Ou results from a conscious staging of this process. The impact can be felt both at the levels of surface and structure. While the sound quality reflects these evocative, multi-layered scenarios, the larger departure from any of her previous works is the album's spatial, mix-like composition, with each track being made up of several companion titles.
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10"
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OP 014EP
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Following and expanding upon the line of thought put forward in her 2013 album Syzygy, Lucrecia Dalt ends in a place familiar, yet noticeably different on her new EP. Its two tracks, "Esotro" and "Veta" continually defy expectation -- haunting vocal ballads that trickle into clouds of white noise -- but for an acquainted listener, that won't surprise. What may are the music's newly raw textures and palpable weight, counterbalancing the carefully wrought beauty that's always been there.
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CD
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HEMK 032CD
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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.
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CD
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HEM 019CD
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At the beginning of history, Ariel Pink once said "all the best shit's made when you're alone." But how far did he imagine this edict could be taken beyond the psychedelic and into the realm of the purely personal? Today, we seem to have two branches in the school of experimental pop. One branch privileges object-hood, richness of surface, and mass-hallucinatory quotation. The other (much less celebrated) branch seeks to recapture authenticity in the form of a highly personal hallucination of music history. With her sophomore full-length, Lucrecia Dalt follows the latter branch as far as it seems to go. She leaps into a surrealist landscape with stunning abandon, eschewing the comparatively safe tropes and song structures of her previous work. And she charts a surprisingly inventive and rewarding territory in the process. Much as it is with her newfound contemporaries at HEM Berlin, for Dalt, solitude and assemblage (of sound, genre, musicology, technique) is an exploratory zone steered toward the inner universe. To follow the music, one must be prepared to make this trip as real as sound itself. Themes of agitation and disturbance, cumulative, impending and scalable, propel Commotus, and create a framework for understanding its emotional spectra. The music lives in the contradiction between having time to reflect on the inevitable, and the irrevocability of its outcome. Dalt, who is a civil engineer with a specialty in geotechnics, knows that motion on a geologic time scale can be the most poignant analogy to the interminable struggle between self-awareness and sea change. Dalt has established herself as a solo performer, building songs live and in recordings using pedals, laptop, and loops. She's even been seen with a touch-screen strapped to the wings of her electric bass. So it's all the more surprising that, throughout Commotus, she works with an enormous, and enormously subtle, sound palette, almost completely triggered from solo bass. (Two notable exceptions being guest appearances from Luke Sutherland and Julia Holter.) Some of these sounds are as concrete as a timpani shot, or the snap of an analog rhythm box. But the majority of sounds exist in a nether-world between evocation and pure abstraction. This is rife terrain for self-expression, and dramatic tension, with a result made all the more poignant because she's playing alone. In Commotus, you can hear every sound-event becoming the curled-up dimensions of a richly personal experience.
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