Bleep

Lucrecia Dalt grew up in Colombia, but the sounds she conjures across her latest LP ¡Ay! often appear not of this Earth. Elements of South American musical traditions are present – tumbaos and bolero percussion instruments are bountiful – but the ever experimental artist arranges them in ways that break from that mould and pairs them alongside other extraterrestrial sonic textures. ¡Ay! finds Lucrecia Dalt securing a middle ground between the Latin influenced sonics of her early recordings and the sci-fi musings of her prior work for the renowned RVNG Intl. label. The end result is music like very little we’ve heard before, and it's her strongest collection of songs to date.

Having released on the incredible RVNG Intl. since 2018 with Anticlines, Lucrecia Dalt has always peered at the outer edges of music with the kind of cosmic wonder reserved for pictures of black holes in outer space: sites of extremity begging to be explored. Her previous album, No era sólida, went far beyond those outer reaches, with oneiric vocal manipulations floating over impossible electronic landscapes. ¡Ay! is a return to the waking world, but makes sure not to leave the ruckus behind, fraying the edges of South American chamber music.

¡Ay! opens right off the bat with a game of hide and seek. ‘No tiempo’ starts as one of the album’s most straightforward pieces: a rousing section of ambience from little more than some church organs and what sounds like a spaceship preparing for take-off builds until it shapeshifts into something resembling country/western jazz, waltzing along into an orchestral jungle of sounds. Dalt croons sweetly in Spanish over the sounds of bright flutes and horns, and a very resonant wood block. To an English ear, it may sound like a blissful lovesong. Diving into the curious poetry of her Spanish lyrics, however, proves a complex and otherworldly story is being told. Dalt reckons philosophically with time and timelessness as she “prepares for temporal adventure”, setting the tone for the rest of an album full of similarly gyroscopic turns.

Returning back to the “sensory echoes” of Dalt’s native Colombia is achieved through time travel, and the temporal thread begins to unspool on ‘El Galatzó’. Spitting sentences to tropical drums and foley-like sound effects colouring every space in between, Dalt’s chilling spoken word says, “I will break your narrative.” The third track ‘Atemporal’ is apt in that it knocks the more traditional mambo off-axis with a Rube Goldberg machine of layered sound design quirks straight out of a cartoon, while the harshly distorted ‘Dicen’ adds an intriguing sour note to the middle of the tracklist. ‘Contenida’ spirals downwards, slowing to a stop and starting up again just as effortlessly, then pulling the listener into the jaws of time on ‘La desmesura’, where traces of noises skirting the maze of baroque arrangements growl deeper the further you travel in. Most intriguing of all is the jazz-meets-downtempo ‘Enviada’ in which upright bass plucks play off sampled percussion that sounds like a computer crashing from file corruption as vocals stutter into oblivion.

Throughout her career, Lucrecia Dalt has exercised the curiosity to stick her hands into musical crevasses, rummaging through unknowns and pulling out whatever she might find. The result is a stunning gem from a wholly singular artist.