I pick up another egg in the kitchen, I break its shell and shape. And from this precise moment there was never an egg...” Clarice Lispector
Today, truly gratifying electronic music is hard to come by and even harder is the prospect of the artist to be able to sustain a distinct career. Lucretia Dalt being one such example. Lucrecia Dalt is a geotechnical engineer born in Colombia who is currently based in Berlin. As a multi-instrumentalist, singer and producer her audible instinct is about authentic energy - call it 'space'. Situated between the physical and the hallucination - between what can be classified as pop and what is considered highly personal. From the delicate to the catatonic. From the unpredictable to the predictable. Unable to codify such diversity - the mainstream settles all such music as "abstract and experimental". Factmag.com explains her profile as "exploring modular synthesisers and the art of making electronic music with hardware." Yet these 'clone-mags' cannot reach beyond the physical limitation and object worship. Instead as Lucretia Dalt explains her vision and sounds as - "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..." Step into the personal, enchanting yet capricious sound of Lucretia Dalt.
"They heard me singing and they told me to stop. Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock..."
Sprawl II - Arcade Fire
Dalt burst into the scene back in 2013, with her debut album Commotus, released on Human Voice Records. Inside the 'supermarket of electronic music', better known as Berlin, seldom does a voice rise above the din of the mainstream 4/4. Commotus is a vivid stack of compositions - each tune a mutation of sorts - a rapacious mixup of genres, eras and sonic slices. Haunted moody-blues over futurist garage with goth vibes! The song Escopolamina (a drug) is perhaps the best example to describe the above dispersion of different aesthetics into a new proto-sound. From the initial reverie of her debut album, Lucrecia Dalt moved into darker, noisier and personal areas, described as "a surrealist landscape with stunning abandon, eschewing the comparatively safe tropes and song structures of her previous work". Consequent albums, Syzygy, Ou and Anticlines are made of field recordings, nature based sounds, spoken word, sampling and modular synthesizers. Even as her albums remain singular in pursuit, Dalt gradually veered into collaborations with contemporary female artists which have manifested as installations, performance art and film-noir. Not surprising, that her current music is supported by Musik GmbH, with project funds from the Commissioner for Culture and Media in Germany.
We Are A Plot Device is made of three voices, in choral form with female personages - a blend of past myths and those being forged for the future. Memory and machines? For instance, Sylvia Plath’s poem 'Three Women' or the trios of mythological figures from the Hesperides, Parcae and Chimera. The output, as a podcast is in chant form. Imagine an oracle engaged in dialogue with Lamella, Chimera and Gaiana. 'Lamella', an object that combines characteristics of animal, machine and desire. Chimera, the manifestation of a given utopia. And 'Gaiana' emanates from the theories of 'Gaia' and Endosymbiosis. In their dialogue, Lamella, Chimera and Gaiana produce fictional technology to place themselves in the grey zone that separates life and nonlife. We Are A Plot Device was eventually realised by Lucrecia Dalt and Regina de Miguel, curated and commissioned by Reina Sofia Museum. Listen to WAAPD.
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