Underskog

Lucrecia Dalt 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.



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 her new album ‘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.