Q&A: The cerebral Colombian experimentalist takes on new loves and new landscapes on A Danger to Ourselves, shedding the conceptual worlds of her previous album
By Karly Quadros for Paste | Photo by Louie Perea –
What makes a song sexy? There’s the obvious lyrical matter, yes, and a closeness of the voice and the breath in your headphones. But there’s something else as well—a certain slipperiness, a feint, a game, an intensity. As the old standard goes, you know it when you hear it.
Lucrecia Dalt’s music may not immediately strike a listener as sexy. The Colombian-born musician’s spacious, layered production has as much in common with Tom Waits and Cosey Fanni Tutti as it does with a new class of Spanish-speaking experimentalists, such as AMORE and Mabe Fratti. But there’s something seductive to Dalt’s music, like you’ve tossed a coin down a well and, in exchange, the witch at the bottom will sing you a song. Her new record, A Danger to Ourselves trickles, hums, and cackles. Born out of a move from Berlin to New Mexico, as well as a generative new creative and romantic partnership with Japan’s David Sylvian, who appears as a producer on the album, the new songs eschew the elaborate world-building of her former work for something more primal—she describes the album as emerging from the “abyssal realm of erotic delirium.”
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