Luca Yupanqui: The unborn baby who released an album
As all proud parents should, those who have just introduced a new life into the world will spend a lot of their time bragging to their friends when their baby hits certain developmental milestones. Of course, this is all an integral part of establishing a close familial bond with your child, and it’s only right for parents to get excited when their youngster starts crawling, takes their first steps, utters their first word, or releases their debut ambient album.
Hang on a second – that last one shouldn’t be there. Most babies aren’t out there making records in their infancy, and to be fair, neither was Argentine-American artist Luca Yupanqui when she recorded her first album for Sacred Bones Records. In fact, she hadn’t even been born when the album was made in 2019. If you’re ever concerned that your baby might be a late bloomer, then yes – if you haven’t secured yourself a record deal before you leave the womb, then what the fuck were you doing in there?
So, how on earth did an unborn baby release an album, let alone record one? It’s not like you can hand a foetus a MIDI keyboard and teach them how to use Ableton. Well, with the help of her parents, musicians Elizabeth Hart of psychedelic rock band Psychic Ills and producer Iván Diaz Mathé, some of her earliest cerebral activities were recorded and processed to create Sounds of the Unborn, a one-of-a-kind record that will likely never be repeated.
I know you’re still perplexed by this and wondering how exactly any recordings were obtained from someone who doesn’t yet exist in the physical realm, but the process behind the record is a frankly fascinating one that involved a mixture of production wizardry and scientific know-how. Using biosonic MIDI technology, Mathé attached several receptors to Hart’s stomach while she was carrying their daughter and recorded the vibrations over five hour-long sessions.
While the album isn’t exactly unedited recordings of a baby in utero, the two parents aimed to keep things as faithful to the original recordings when manipulating them so as to not disrupt the ‘expressions’ of their child. Much of the album consists of drones and hums that are warped to the point that you wouldn’t imagine they stemmed from the recordings of a womb, but as Hart and Mathé insist, they wanted to allow “Luca’s message to exist in its raw form”, which I suppose is what we get.
Luca was born in November 2019, meaning that she was actually approaching 18 months old by the time Sounds of the Unborn was released in 2021, but to have an album out by this point in your life is still a pretty extraordinary feat to have achieved. Not only that, but she released a remix album, Conversations, in 2022, with several contributors, including Laraaji and Suzanne Ciani, offering reworkings of the debut album.
There’s often talk about starting your children in creative hobbies from a young age, but perhaps this is taking the notion to an extreme. Now five years old, Luca hasn’t yet followed up with another record, and we don’t yet know if she’ll even follow her parents’ career paths and enter the music industry, but if this is what she has to offer on a debut album, I can’t wait to see what she does a few records down the line.
