News

MED 2016 - Lucrecia Dalt
12.02.2016 23:59

Lucrecia Dalt, Berlin, DE – Pereira, Colombia - 00:00

Dalt’s music has the heft of a bass guitar.
The music from Lucrecia Dalt’s first phase, starting late in the last decade, was plenty experimental, though it consisted of songs built around rhythm tracks and lyrics. A broad range of ideas filled up the middle, foremost being meditative bass guitar. Between her 2012 and 2013 albums, Commotus and Syzygy, the structure started to break apart like ice floes at sea. Words retreated and beats shrunk to clicks and pulses. Always nocturnal, the air shifted from humid stillness to a cold breeze. Even as her work moves towards purely electronic sounds, it retains something natural and analogue. Like Forest Swords, Dalt’s music feels like it’s made in the open air.
With her sophomore album, Commotus crafts a surrealist landscape borne by the inexorable scope and sand-swept surfaces of geologic time. 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 new-found contemporaries at HEM Berlin, for Dalt, solitude and assemblage (of sound, genre, musicology, technique) is an exploratory zone steered toward the inner universe.
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.
In Ou there’s just a few shades at work — throbs, muffled clanks, hydraulic spits and small motor whirrs. With constrained colors, laid only in thin washes, the music piques and disorients. Half-erased whispers slide around in the opening, disappearing into oscillators. Out of extended hazes, call and response grooves emerge. She’ll use 4/4 low hits and ricochet chirps like you might find in minimal techno, but the rhythms never stick around long enough to resemble dance music. (B. Donnelly)