Saturday, February 16th, ISSUE is proud to present Colombian musician and composer Lucrecia Dalt, her first U.S. performance since 2014. Celebrating the recent release of her acclaimed 2018 album Anticlines on Brooklyn-based music institution RVNG Intl, the evening features Dalt’s interstitial exploration of speech and song, vocal processing and spoken word, songcraft and mercurial ambient music -- all coinciding into “a volume of bodily and geological substrates within poetic theory and sound.” Philadelphia-based duo Metasplice also present new work, showcasing a shifting sonic space existing between electronic free improvisation and live post-production techniques.
Thematically departing from her work as a former geotechnical engineer, Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines fuses several overlapping narratives into a composite work where “geological & astronomical timescales are compressed into intimate sound experiments” (The Wire). In structural geology, anticlines are arch-shaped rock formations created by compression of layers and stratified rock. Similarly, on Anticlines, Dalt bends disparate elements into delicate shapes that highlight careful pace, breath, and complex texture. Using traditional South American rhythms to support her contemporary electronic compositions, the album features lyrics describing everything from the Colombian myth of El Boraro, an “Amazonian monster who turns its victims insides to pulp before sucking them dry” to ruminations on “human dependence on earth at the boundary of the heliopause.”
Overall, Dalt articulates her live performance of Anticlines as “operating in a process of concatenation. It’s like an act of remembering and forgetting what just passed, and I act as a very active vector in the present, allowing the sounds that compose Anticlines to shape, emerge and move into the room. The set cares for dynamics, for space awareness, there are moments of almost silence, if the room and the audience allows for that.”
With a similarly materialist sonic approach, Metasplice performances are the result of weekly freeform rehearsals that focus on rich, spatial composition recently demonstrated on their latest album, Mirvariates (The Trilogy Tapes, 2018).
A former geotechnical engineer from Colombia currently residing in Berlin, Lucrecia Dalt’s concern with boundaries and edges shape the lyrics and music of Anticlines, her sixth album. Paying careful attention to pace, breath, and texture, Dalt microtonally shifts the distance between speech and song. Lucrecia arrived at the atmosphere of Anticlines after several months of studying and creating new patches for the Clavia Nord Modular, forming a rhythmic feedback flow with it, a Moogerfooger MuRF, and her voice. The overall effect of cavernous space backdroping Dalt’s intimate vocal phrasing rewards contemplation, supported in the physical formats of Anticlines by a lyric booklet documenting Lucrecia’s collaboration with Australian artist Henry Andersen. Mystic of matter, Lucrecia Dalt has previously performed and worked with Julia Holter and Gudrun Gut, her slippery spoken word and performative nature recalling the work of Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Asmus Tietchens, or Lena Platonos. While touching stones, The Thing by Dylan Trigg, Cascade Experiment by Alice Fulton, and Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl are but a few formative scripts that support Dalt’s exploration of the betwixt and between. In preparing a live set for Anticlines, Dalt plans to stage an uninterrupted configuration, like a kind of alienated lecture, aiming for “gestures that create tensions with non-existent objects.” Dalt intends “to provide meaning and a place for the listener to meditate or relate to the concerns and ideas” she presents.
Metasplice formed in the summer of 2010 following an impromptu jam session. This later inspired the future duo to release a split record of solo material on _bruxist in early 2011. After touring for the record, the group began collaborating and recording full time. In spring of 2012, the duo released a cassette, ‘MS I/II’ (Injections Limited) that caught the ears of Morphine Records. After releasing a couple of EPs on Morphine, the group released their critically acclaimed debut album, Infratracts (Morphine, 2013), earning them tours throughout Europe and a mind-bending stint in Japan. In the years that followed, they shifted their focus to recording their 2nd full length, metasplice (_bruxist, 2015): a studio representation of their live performance material up to that point (also demonstrated on several self–released live show cassettes). Summer 2018 has become a proper re-entry point for Metasplice. Their 3rd album, Mirvariates, has attracted attention throughout the electronic music world.