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Tristan Allen, “Tin Iso and the Dawn” (RVNG INTL, 2023)

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This is New York-based composer/puppeteer Tristan Allen’s full-length debut and it is quite an ambitious one, as Tin Iso and the Dawn is the first chapter of a planned “shadow puppet symphony” trilogy loosely based on Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” that has been in the works since 2015. From where I am standing, there are innumerable ways in which such an album could go wrong and they range from “forgettable score to cool puppet show” to “cloyingly precious” to “outright bombastic.” Instead, however, Tin Iso and the Dawn sounds like a stone-cold masterpiece dropped by a creative supernova. Listening back to Allen’s previous discography (a pair of classical piano EPs), it almost feels like this vision materialized out of nowhere, but the seeds of this puppet-centric magnum opus may have been planted more than a decade ago when Allen co-wrote a piece with Amanda Palmer in the early days of her “Dresden Dolls hiatus” solo career.

The album begins in somewhat deceptive fashion, as “Opening” is initially just a bittersweet solo piano melody that feels like a simple yet lovely classical piece built from a few well-chosen arpeggios. That is familiar territory for Allen, but that familiarity begins unraveling in under a minute, as the arpeggios are quickly enlivened with harmonies, melodic flourishes, rhythmic disruptions, psychotropic tendrils, and a wake of groans and lingering decays. Then yet another surprise happens in the final minute, as it sounds like Allen stops playing, closes the piano, and lets the lingering haze of murk threaten to become a self-perpetuating drone piece. If Allen were some kind of Andy Kaufman-style performance artist/comedian, it would have been a solid move to let that haze of decay play out for another forty minutes, but it instead segues into the first of four acts (“Act I: Stars and Moon”). From that point onward, Tin Iso and the Dawn features a near-unbroken run of achingly beautiful and unique orchestral pieces.

The four acts share some common themes and textures, unsurprisingly, but they each feel like their own discrete world as well. In “Stars and Moon,” for example, a slow-motion chord progression quickly blossoms into an epic-sounding swell of brooding brass, gnarled distortion, sensuously dreamlike flutes, and something that sounds like it could plausibly be puppets playing rusty xylophones. Aside from being a wonderfully haunting piece in general, “Stars and Moon” was the first piece in which I found myself awe-struck by Allen’s uniquely brilliant execution. For one, it has the scale of an orchestral composition, yet organically ebbs and flows like an especially beautiful drone piece rather than a formal composition: Allen’s manipulation of layers feels akin to that of a killer dance producer expertly adding and removing cymbals and kicks (albeit with puppets and flutes instead). I was similarly struck by Allen’s lightness of touch and inspired balance of textures. Pure beauty is nice and all, but pure beauty being gnarled and gnawed in interesting ways is even better.

Happily, the second act (“Sea and Sky”) is every bit as wonderful as the first, as it sounds like a swooning and bittersweet distillation of Disintegration-era Cure’s lush Romanticism. There are also plenty of psychotropic and ravaged textures to help deepen my immersion, of course, but I was additionally struck by how Allen is able to work on such a large scale without sacrificing any sensuality or intimacy.

The album admittedly loses a little steam with the more ambient-adjacent third act (“Land and Growth”), but only because it feels a bit like a score rather than a stand-alone piece. I can only assume that the puppets are going to be doing something so incredibly cool that Allen concluded that the music should temporarily downshift into a mere backdrop, but I enjoyed the pleasantly ghostly ambiance nonetheless. Also, there is a subtly gorgeous glassy/fluttering motif in the final moment that feels like a supernatural fog just dissipated to reveal a beautiful phantasmagoric lepidopterarium. I bet Wagner never did that. Probably never even occurred to him, in fact.

To my ears, the centerpiece of the album is the fourth act (“Death and the Dawn”), which is yet another slow-motion masterpiece of bittersweet Romanticism. All of the elements that I love from the earlier pieces are back in prime form (haunting melodies, softly beautiful flutes, well-timed intrusions of distortion/feedback, etc.), but there are also a couple of new features that elevate it to another plane altogether. The first is that it feels like the central melody is being played on a massive Ellen Fullman-esque zither or prepared piano soundboard in which the entire room becomes an immersive resonance chamber (and I love that the harmonic-like melody is enhanced with a lingering decay that falls out of sync). It also features my favorite touch on the entire album: a mournful brass moan around the 8-minute mark that briefly cuts through the piece like a howl of anguish, then promptly vanishes.

The final act is also an unusually warm piece, which is yet another illustration of Allen’s impressive appreciation for nuance and lightness of touch. Given that Tin Iso and the Dawn is a Wagner-inspired shadow puppet story with doomed Romanticism at its heart, this easily could have been a very dark album (or a very camp one), but Allen keeps enough genuine human warmth at its core that it feels like a bittersweet celebration of both life and love instead. In keeping with that theme, the album closes with a brief solo piano coda that feels vibrantly spontaneous and alive, which is an absolutely perfect way to end: it feels like a dreamlike spell has just lifted to reveal a flesh and blood human alone at a piano. If I were experiencing this live (something I definitely hope to do now), that last touch would probably nudge me (and everyone else) into a spontaneous standing ovation. This is an absolutely wonderful and one-of-a-kind debut that deserves an immediate and passionate cult following.

Listen here.

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Lucrecia Dalt, “¡Ay!” (RVNG Intl., 2022)

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I was caught completely off guard by this latest opus from Dalt, as much of it sounds more like a three-way collaboration between Astrud Gilberto, Perez Prado, and Walter Wanderley than anything resembling the warped and stark electronic pop mutations that the Colombian composer has become synonymous with. After my initial disbelief subsided, however, I quickly decided that ¡Ay! may very well be the strongest album of Dalt’s career to date.

I suspect Dalt herself would probably agree, as it would be fair to say that her vision remains as compelling and innovative as ever, but she has merely kicked her self-imposed artistic restraints to the curb and embraced the warmer, more sensuous, and melodic sounds that she grew up around. Or, as the album description colorfully puts it, “through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began.” In any case, the end result is a wonderfully sultry and evocative collection of seductive vocals and tropical rhythms beautifully enhanced with a host of psychotropic and industrial-damaged touches. And she somehow makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world. I definitely did not expect Dalt to secretly be a tropical pop genius at all, which makes her previous albums all the more fascinating now that I know that they were made while pointedly suppressing some of her greatest strengths.

The opening “No Tiempo” initially evokes a “late-night cable” fever dream vibe in which a Bela Lugosi vampire movie blurs into an organ-happy televangelist, but it quickly transforms into swaying tropical bliss once the flutes and the lazily sultry groove make the scene. It has the feel of a Wanderley/Gilberto collaboration that has been punched up (and sexed up) for contemporary ears by an intrepid DJ (though I was still startled by the brass finale). It is a great piece, but it is immediately eclipsed by the following “El Galatzó,” which masterfully combines hushed, confessional-sounding vocals with bass strums, trilling flutes, cooing backing vox, swelling strings, industrial scrapes, strangled feedback, and killer hand-percussion to cast a sustained spell of noir-ish, cinematic seduction.

While “El Galatzó” would be my personal pick for the album’s reigning highlight, the album is not hurting for other hot contenders for that honor. In “Contenida,” for example, a hallucinatory fog and a jazzy double bass motif cohere into some kind of humid and dubby bossa nova mindfuck, which then beautifully erupts in a viscerally clattering metal percussion frenzy. If the whole album sustained a similarly perfect balance of ambitious dub/industrial production brilliance and sultry songcraft, I would have no hesitation at all about proclaiming ¡Ay! to be the album of the year.

Instead of flogging that winning formula to death, however, Dalt opted to explore some alternate flavors of dubby, industrial-gnawed seduction with the remaining pieces. On “Atemporal,” Dalt strikes gold again with a simmering groove, soulful horns, and a warbly Farfisa-sounding hook. Elsewhere, “Gena” returns to languorously noir moods, resembling a deconstructed Perez Prado cut enhanced with Thirlwell-esque blurts of artificial brass and a host of texturally delightful dub flourishes. Literally every single song on the album is compelling, however, as Dalt keeps finding new ways to surprise and delight me. Sometimes she plays things almost unrecognizably straight (“Bochinche”), while other pieces pack bracingly gnarled crescendos or psychotropic flurries of panning and echoing percussion. Other times, I am blindsided by arrangements so ambitious that I would have guessed that a major motion picture studio had lavished Dalt with money to assemble her own Xavier Cugat-esque all-star orchestra.

Sadly, that probably did not happen, but Dalt did enlist an impressive batch of guest musicians to bring her dream to life nonetheless. Moreover, she managed to make this album in Berlin during a pandemic rather than from a seaside town in 1960s Brazil, Colombia, or Cuba, which makes her something of a master illusionist as well. The sole caveat with ¡Ay! is that a lot of Dalt’s previously distinctive idiosyncrasies are present in more muted form than usual, which may disappoint fans of her more “outer limits” tendencies. To my ears, however, Dalt has actually transcended those tendencies in inspired fashion, as ¡Ay! feels more natural and less self-consciously arty than her previous work (and it does not hurt that it is absolutely packed with hooks as well).

Listen here.

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Rachika Nayar, “Fragments” (Commend/RVNG Intl., 2021)

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This new EP is something of a sketchbook-like companion piece to Nayar’s sublime debut album. More specifically, it is a collection of “sonic miniatures Nayar constructed from guitar loops . . . in the familiar comforts of her own bedroom,” as well as a glimpse of what her raw material sounds like before it is processed and reshaped into “grander mutated compositions” like those of Our Hands Against the Dark. 

In theory, that should make Fragments something of a minor release, but these more simple and intimate pieces are often even better than those of Nayar’s more formal work, albeit with the caveat that more than half of these pieces end in under two minutes (and the others do not stick around much longer). Nevertheless, Nayar is an incredibly gifted guitarist with a remarkably strong melodic sensibility and this album is quite a sustained hot streak of great (if ephemeral) ideas. 

As with her previous album, it is not hard to spot Nayar’s influences—in fact, some pieces are even intended as homages to folks like Pat Metheny and Steve Reich. That said, the main touchstones I hear are more hook-minded contemporary artists like Mark McGuire and some classic Midwestern emo. That is generally welcome stylistic terrain in my book (I still love early Promise Ring), but the real beauty of Fragments lies in how often Nayar matches or surpasses her influences at their own games.

The album begins in impressive fashion with two nearly perfect pieces in a row. The first, “memory as miniature,” opens with chiming clean arpeggios before revealing a lead guitar melody that hits the breezy, laid back California vibe of prime McGuire before a synth-sounding chord progression pulls everything in a more bittersweet dreampop direction. Everything about it is wonderful, but I was especially struck by the beauty of the intricately chiming arpeggios that form its backdrop. 

The following “clarity,” on the other hand, starts off sounding like a candidate for the best American Football song ever, as Nayar unleashes a gorgeously vibrant and ascending guitar melody. Much like its predecessor, however, “clarity” sticks tenaciously to its perfect opening theme and merely enhances it a bit with shimmering chords and some warm synth-like coloration in the periphery. Both of those pieces are prime examples of the compositional aesthetic that defines Fragments: each piece is essentially just an incredibly cool guitar hook playing out for a couple minutes before fading out or abruptly ending. 

While it lasts, each theme is subtly fleshed out to add emotional depth and a sense of harmonic development, yet each song is still essentially a single theme that is not allowed to blossom into a fully formed song. In theory, that should be exasperating (“aaaargh, why did you stop?!?”), but it is hard to complain when every too-soon ending only leads to yet another improbably beautiful new theme. In fact, there is not a single moment on Fragments that does not sound like an excerpt from a killer emo classic, an imaginary Slowdive song about to erupt, or the perfect soundtrack for a sun-dappled summer drive along the California coast. While I dearly wish this EP was (much) longer, I would be hard pressed to hard to think of many other releases from this year that can match Fragments for sheer wall-to-wall greatness.

Samples can be found here.

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Lucrecia Dalt, “No era sólida” (RVNG INTL., 2020)

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With 2018’s Anticlines, this Berlin-based artist established herself as one of the more adventurous and unique composers to surface in the experimental music scene in recent years and I am pleased to report that this follow-up burrows even deeper into the oft-fascinating rabbit hole of its predecessor. On a conceptual level, that deepening manifests itself in No era sólida‘s deeply unusual themes, as the album is billed as a “suspended auditory illusion” that “embraces the possibilities of possession.” 

Thankfully, the possession in this case is not of the demonic variety, as Dalt instead envisions the album as a sort of interrogation room where she interacts with an invented character named Lia. If Dalt were a lesser artist, such a premise would likely send me running in the other direction, but she executes it in such a subtle and abstract way that listening to No era sólida feels akin to unexpectedly finding myself in Twin Peaks’ “red room”: everything familiar is unrecognizably transformed into something disconcertingly alien and enigmatic. While the rare songs that blur into pop-like territory (such as “Ser boca”) are generally the album’s strongest moments, the entirety of No era sólida casts an impressively unique and haunting spell.

The first time I heard the album, I was amusingly reminded of the pivotal scene in 1997’s Air Bud in which a referee announces that there is nothing in the rule book that states that dogs cannot play basketball. Thankfully, any similarities between the Air Bud franchise and Dalt’s work conclusively begin and end there, but there is definitely something striking about how effortlessly she disregards and circumvents convention in both her approach to songwriting and how she wields the various tools in her starkly minimal palette. While Dalt is far from the first experimentalist to approach music in a unique way, her occasional proximity to pop music greatly heightens the disorientating effect of her innovations. In essence, she achieves the musical analogue of the “uncanny valley” effect. 

My favorite piece on the album, “Ser boca,” is the most mesmerizing example of this phenomenon: all the expected elements of a catchy song are arguably in place (a great groove, a strong hook, a vocal melody, etc.), yet there is something profoundly “off” about absolutely all of them. The beat is hollow and sluggish, the hook feels hazy and stuck in an obsessively repeating loop, and the main vocal melody is intertwined with something that resembles distracted ululating. And yet it is great both because of and in spite of all that. In this case, the wordless warbling sounds seem to originate from a synthesizer rather than Dalt’s own vocal cords, but one of her stated intentions was to “channel a Surrealist’s automatism” to dissolve “language into an evocative collection of glossolalia.” In that regard, No era sólida is a resounding success, as several of the other pieces make me feel like I just wandered inside a psychedelic birdhouse (especially the fluttering flute-like tones of “Seca” and the strangely lurching whines of “Di”).

I suspect “Seca” is also a prime example of one of Dalt’s other recent interests: finding ways to creatively exploit “harmonic distortion in tape delay” (it is presumably no coincidence that Dalt and Aaron Dilloway have become repeat collaborators). I also suspect that an entire book could be written about all of the other interesting techniques and concepts that went into this album, as I have said absolutely nothing about the various transformations that Dalt’s imagined protagonist undergoes or the central role they play in shaping the album’s arc. In broad strokes, however, the album purportedly mirrors Lia’s emergence “from primal, sensory states to the sentient and active conditions” of “revolt” and understanding. As a listener, I experience much of that structure as an elusive and enigmatic abstraction, but the woozily angelic title piece does feel like it ends Lia’s journey in a place of calming beauty, coherent form, and clarity. 

Lia’s evolution before that point can feel quite murky and inscrutable though, as the album unfolds as one strange and hallucinatory vignette after another like a hall of mirrors in a phantom carnival. In fact, Dalt’s aesthetic is so alien and disorienting that I am hard-pressed to guess at even a single one of her influences. One inspiration is admittedly mentioned in the album description (“griot singer Fanta Damba”), but knowing that does not change the fact that everything ultimately emerges in completely unrecognizable form once it passes through the prism of Dalt’s artistic vision. Consequently, it is best to abandon any attempts to either place No era sólida in a larger cultural context or unravel what any individual piece might mean. The album’s true pleasure lies in simply entering the psychedelic bird house and allowing the cavalcade of unpredictable sensory experiences to work their weird magic.

Given that I have spent most of my life chasing down increasingly outré and challenging sounds and that this album still managed to beguile and bewilder me in spite of that, it is safe to say that No era sólida is a triumph on at least one level. Beyond that, however, it is hopeless to try and be at all objective about whether or not it is a fascinating outlier, a goddamn masterpiece, or just exasperatingly self-indulgent. My gut tells me that Dalt is an endlessly compelling artist and that this is a very good album, but such a conclusion admittedly comes with some caveats. 

The main one is that I wish there were more moments in which No era sólida cohered into something approximating a structured song. There are a few, such as the aforementioned “Ser Boca” and the atypically melodic lead single “Disuelta,” yet the bulk of the album occupies a territory more akin to psychotropic tape collages that do not evolve into anything greater. Admittedly, I am exactly the target demographic for such a thing, but Dalt even wrongfoots me there by avoiding the obvious move of creating a shifting pulse with subtly out-of-phase fragments. Instead, it feels like Dalt is allowing me a brief window into a single mysterious and vividly realized tableau…and then moving onto the next one before I am able to fully grasp the meaning or experience what happens next. 

Of course, a case can also be made that each piece is merely a detail in a thoughtfully constructed and sophisticated whole (and it would be a fairly strong case). However, No era sólida still feels a lot like a puzzle that I struggle to assemble only to find that the final image reveals yet another puzzle (admittedly a cool trick). In any case, I suspect only time will tell whether or not No era sólida‘s otherworldly spell will continue to deepen for me, but I certainly love that it exists: this is unquestionably one of the most memorably original albums of the year.

Samples can be found here.

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Lucrecia Dalt, “Anticlines” (RVNG Intl., 2018)

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This album, Dalt’s sixth, is my first exposure to the iconoclastic Colombian’s work and it feels like an ideal entry point, as it is quite a beguiling album that is universally hailed as a major creative breakthrough. Due to its stark and unusual futurist aesthetic and constrained palette of primitive-sounding electronics, Anticlines definitely calls to mind both classic Chris & Cosey and minimal wave fare, yet Dalt’s vision is transcendently bizarre enough to feel like something radical and new. Her desiccated and industrialized Latin/South American rhythms are certainly a part of that, but the real brilliance of Anticlines lies in Dalt‚Äôs lyrics and vocals: on songs like “Tar,” she resembles a sexy cyborg, bloodlessly and seductively intoning breathy, cryptic poetry that feels like it alludes to vast depths of hidden meaning and feeling.

Lucrecia Dalt’s life and career have had a rather singular trajectory, as she was once a geotechnical engineer, then had some success as an indie synthpop artist. At some point, Dalt moved to Berlin, and her music gradually became increasingly radical, experimental, and abstract. To some degree, Anticlines feels like an inspired synthesis of Dalt’s pop side and her more cerebral, outré impulses, but it also feels like she just added a whole new level of playful experimentalism to her existing aesthetic with her poetic word craft. That is an impressive and rare feat, as Dalt has simultaneously deepened and expanded her art and shaped her vision into an incredibly listenable “pop” album (of sorts). Also, Dalt seems to be almost supernaturally gifted at filtering and diffracting incredibly disparate influences through her distinctive vision, as she drew inspiration from everything from poetry (Alice Fulton) to phenomenology (Dylan Trigg) to Robert Ashley to Aaron Dilloway.
She also collaborated with two artists, Henry Anderson and Regina de Miguel. I am sure shades of all of those folks appear here, but I would be very hard pressed to identify any of them after everything has been distilled to just a simple synth pattern and Dalt’s voice.

Put glibly, I could probably say that Anticlines sounds like Daphne Oram aggressively remixed Songs of Love and Lust and totally gutted most of Chris Carter’s contributions, and be stylistically quite close to the mark, but there is too much depth and subtlety in Dalt’s work for any comparison to be truly apt. Dalt is making very forward-thinking art, yet her extremely simple arsenal of a compact synth and an effects processor unquestionably harkens back to an earlier era of electronic music: these songs are almost all crafted from repeating patches and little more. Anticlines does not feel kitschy or retro though—it instead feels like Dalt is making something vibrant and sophisticated from relatively rudimentary tools. The simplicity makes these pieces feel direct and undiluted by unnecessary artifice.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest pieces are ones with the best hooks (I like hooks), particularly the album’s lead single “Tar.” As with every song on Anticlines, the musical component is extremely minimal, but “Tar” is a bit more rhythmic than the other pieces, marrying a sultry and burbling Latin rhythm to little more than woozily passing synth coloration and some eerily seductive vocals (“we have touched‚ as only atmospheres touch”). The vocals predictably steal the show completely, but Dalt also displays a vivid talent for creating a disorienting sense of unreality, as the simmering pulse sounds like digitized dripping stalactites and strange sounds irregularly flutter into the piece like confused electronic birds.

The album’s other “pop” highlight is the opening “Edge,” as Dalt announces that she is “gathering up skins and blowing them up like balloons” and wonders aloud “how long does everybody last without organs?” over a chirping and squiggling backdrop of electronic bloops and beeps. I am also quite fond of the more inhuman and hostile-sounding “Analogue Mountains,” which combines a relentlessly repeating chromatic spew of synth tones with rather cold and distant vocals. “Errors of Skin” is similarly robotic, creeping into Throbbing Gristle-esque territory with its mélange of clock-like rhythm; chilly, processed vocals; and warped, sickly intrusions of “melody.”

The rest of the album is also quite interesting, but the remaining pieces are considerably more abstract and nakedly experimental, unfolding more as a series of hallucinatory interludes than distinct, memorable songs.The best of the lot might be the dreamily slow-motion and clanking fugue of “Glass Brain,” which feels like one of Dalt’s catchier songs has been stretched and corroded beyond recognition. Other pieces, like “Axis Excess” and “Indifferent Universe,” feel like shards of actual songs that blossomed into something stranger when decontextualized. Elsewhere, Anticlines resembles everything from the ambient sounds of an abandoned space station (“Antiform”) to a chopped and alien-sounding gospel choir (“Eclipsed Subject”).

My sole caveat with Anticlines is that it is heavily front-loaded with Dalt’s most inspired and fully formed songs (the voice-centered ones), which I suppose makes a great deal of sense from a sequencing perspective: Dalt drew me in with her catchy avant-garde pop fare, then expanded into increasingly experimental and obtuse fare once I was ensnared. While I do enjoy the many strange instrumental vignettes that populate the second half of the album, it is the comparatively accessible songs like “Tar” and “Edge” that stand out as memorable and capture Dalt at the height of her powers as a visionary avant-pop auteur. Anticlines is leaner on such moments than would be ideal and would be better if the last part of the album were broken up by another hook-filled gem or two.

That said, the album does otherwise have a very distinctive and coherent aesthetic, an effective dynamic arc, and a sense of constant forward momentum, as Dalt is always doing something appealingly unusual and never lets a piece overstay its welcome. Anticlines maintains an unbroken and evocative retro-futurist spell from start to finish. More importantly, Anticlines’ minor flaws are easily eclipsed by the magnitude of its success, as Dalt has achieved something quite wonderful and singular: she has conjured up a perversely sensuous futurist dystopia that feels refreshingly simple and intimate. Given all of its conceptual and cerebral themes, this album is unquestionably Serious Sound Art, yet Dalt has found a way to imbue her more challenging impulses with soul, dark eroticism, and DIY charm.

Listen here.