Lucrecia Dalt - ¡Ay!

Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! Is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began. CD edition includes lyrics and an essay by Miguel Prado in Spanish and English.

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Lucrecia Dalt is gleefully cerebral. Over the last decade, the Colombian artist has used her oblique experimental music to ponder metaphysical phenomena and the nature of human consciousness. Dalt has a fondness for philosophical contemplation, and concepts from her training as a geotechnical engineer often creep into her work. On her new album ¡Ay!, she reprises this erudite mode. This time around, the story centers on Preta, an extraterrestrial entity that arrives on our planet and confronts earthly conceptions of temporality, embodiment, and love for the first time. Across 10 tracks, Dalt sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with, traced with ambling congas, jazzy double bass, and quivering tides of distortion. Unspooling the rhythmic threads of these styles, she weaves them with strands of opacity and dissonance. Through it all, Dalt poses questions about the rhizomatic essence of time, skillfully using texture and acoustics to make good on the promise of narrative-driven experimental music.

¡Ay! isn’t just technically masterful; it’s also an audacious statement on cultural identity. In the Western world, traditional or folkloric genres from Latin America, especially ones with African and/or Indigenous origins, are seen as static and creatively stale. These are presumed to be relics of the past, styles that few experimental musicians would touch. But on ¡Ay!, Dalt spurns that kind of colonial thinking. Instead of dismissing the genres of her youth, she transforms and stretches them, demonstrating how capacious they really are. The result is an invitation to broaden narrow interpretations of Latin American music and identity, embracing multiplicity and idiosyncrasy in the process.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucrecia-dalt-ay/