Lucrecia Dalt Cerebral with pleasure. Over the past decade, the Colombian artist has used her oblique experimental music to ponder metaphysical phenomena and the nature of human consciousness. Dalt likes philosophical reflections, and her concepts from her training as a geotechnical engineer often creep into her work.about her new album Ah! She recreates this erudite mode. This time the story focuses on Preta, an extraterrestrial being who arrives on our planet and for the first time confronts the terrestrial concept of temporality, embodiment and love. Across ten tracks, Dalt sketches her sci-fi vision of the boleros, sons and other classical her genres she grew up with, tracing them in a tide of ambling congas, jazzy contrabass and quivering distortion. Unraveling the rhythmic threads of these styles, she weaves them in threads of opacity and dissonance. Through it all, Dalt questions the fundamental nature of time, and skillfully uses textures and sonics to successfully deliver on the promise of narrative-driven, experimental music.
Ah! It’s not just technically superior. It’s also a bold statement about cultural identity. In the Western world, Latin American traditional or folk genres, especially those with African or indigenous origins, are viewed as static and creatively banal. It’s a style that experimental musicians rarely touch. but, Ah! Dalt fuels that kind of colonial thinking. Rather than denying the genres of her youth, she transforms them, stretches them, and shows how much power they hold. As a result, she broadens her narrow interpretation of Latin American music and identity, coming to embrace diversity and idiosyncrasies in the process.
The context of all this may sound crazy, but Ah! You don’t need to fully understand the details of its story, or even study its underlying sources. All you have to do is surrender to it. Ah! It’s reminiscent of the smoky after-hours lounges in 1940’s spy movies. It’s so vivid and immersive that it feels as if Dalt is singing directly into your ears, perhaps a byproduct of her recent adventures as a film and television composer.
Take the outstanding ‘El Galatzó’. Sombre double basses vibrate, flutes soar, intergalactic synths linger like UFOs hanging in the sky. Here the warm, open tapping of bongos played on wooden sticks converges with the sting of metallic synths to reveal the rhythmic silhouette of the bolero. Dalt assumes his Preta perspective, lowering his voice and bringing it closer to the mic. She pronounces her own words with her intention, each fricative consonant arriving with controlled, breathtaking precision. The track unfolds at a slower tempo than Bolero and His Son usually play, giving it a charming, meandering touch. By the time the final verse arrives, Preta no longer feels like describing her experiences in the concrete world. It’s almost like a manifesto, as if Dalt himself refuses to conform to restrictive ideas of identity and genre. “No obedezco a tu verdad lineal,” she sings with Dalt crescendoing high-pitched strings in the background. (“I will not follow your linear truth…/Disrupt your story/And change your flat landscape.”)