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LOVE 141LP
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Spend any amount of time pacing the streets of Monterrey, the bustling city in the north of Mexico where Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, grew up, and you'll be sure to catch traces of cumbia echoing from Bluetooth speakers, DIY soundsystems or car stereos. The sound struck a chord with locals, and huge street parties hosted by ramshackle soundsystems known as sonideros unified the diverse community. So when cumbia rebajada materialized serendipitously in the 1990s, it emphasized and highlighted the memory distortions at the heart of the immigrant experience. Local record collector, selector and sonidero Gabriel Dueñez had been playing cumbia for hours one night when disaster struck: his turntable's motor overheated and slowed down turning the music into a warped groan, with half-speed voices echoing over wobbly accordion drones and splashy drums. But the crowd kept dancing, and Sonido Dueñez realized he'd struck gold -- cumbia rebajada was born. Over the next few years he dubbed a popular series of mixtapes, hawking them at the flea market on the dried-up Santa Catarina riverbed beneath El Puente del papa, the bridge that links downtown Monterrey with Independencia. And these woozy archives became the stuff of legend, poetically but subconsciously shadowing DJ Screw's series of epochal cassettes that appeared over the border in Houston. Beatriz uses Sonido Dueñez's first two tapes as the starting point for Desaceleradas, entering into a dialogue with time, culture and geography as she recalls the sonic ecosystem that surrounded her decades ago, long before she emigrated to the USA. If 2022's acclaimed The Long Count was an attempt to recover concealed pre-Columbian history in the face of colonization, Desaceleradas jumps forward, figuring out how memory and shared celebration can resist a more contemporary form of cultural erasure. As AI systems scrape, blend and decontextualize culture around the world, leaving vapid slop, Desaceleradas proposes a slower, more careful, and ultimately more human kind of engagement. It's an archive with a pulse.
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LP
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LOVE 121LP
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Delia Beatriz's musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017's acclaimed Animus, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released EP SYSTEM harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. On The Long Count, the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It's audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane. The Long Count is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments -- whistles, ocarinas, flutes, and trumpets -- using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico's pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music. The ten tracks of The Long Count form a ritual that's a few footsteps out of time -- neither a part of our present, nor the past. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that's not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it's impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it's feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance. Beatriz's soundscapes are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, and are as intentional, direct and meticulously crafted as the work of Deathprod or Thomas Köner. Her microtonal compositions are psychedelic to their core, shapeshifting through dimensions and painting complex mental images, while retaining a stylistic focus and lucidity that's all too rare. Although The Long Count was nurtured by machines, human experience is coded into its DNA - an ancient-future heirloom that whispers through countless generations. File under: magick concrète. RIYL: Kali Malone's just intonation work, CC Hennix's concentrated music. Clear vinyl; printed inner sleeves.
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