Lucrecia Dalt – ‘A Danger to Ourselves’ album review: nebulous electronica teeming with strange lifeforms
Colombian electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt is gifted with a canny knack for not just exploring any given song’s subject, but unveiling its veneer to reveal the knotted, tangled, and mysterious inner-workings of her thematic reverie in all its teeming mystery.
Her work is all the better for it. Dalt’s sonic dwell wanders a nocturnal and foggy realm of flickering jazz licks, rippling synths, and smoky percussion indulging in lyrical sleight of hands, hinting at fictional narratives and artful alter-egos on previous albums. Following her soundtrack work for HBO’s The Baby and Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl black comedy, Dalt has turned her trenchant ambience on herself and revealed a more personal yet no less nebulous conjuring of experimental electronics.
Released via New York’s RVNG Intl, A Danger to Ourselves attempts to examine the frissons that spark underneath a new relationship’s blossoming. Exciting, fraught, vulnerable, passionate, such confounding clashes all lie eerily in the aural sediment of her seventh record under the Dalt moniker, crackling with a febrile radiation amid its alchemic atmospheres.
It’s the constant wavering that keeps the listener hooked to the record’s aural traverse. Be it Dalt’s fluid veer between English and her Spanish tongue, the subtle dialling between terse serenity and ethereal arrest, and the mottled textures that slither across and engulf your brain when listening on headphones, She sculpts a beguiling marriage of acoustic terrain and computer modulations that lend a grippingly alien air, with A Danger to Ourselves’ sonic front flushing and changing colours amid the spectral sparsity.
There’s little surprise that former Japan frontman David Sylvian shares production duties. More than just a studio honcho for hire, Sylvian’s ambient fingerprints can be detected all over A Danger to Ourselves, handling the record’s mix, lending his baritone croon to album opener ‘Cosa Rara’, and even inspiring the LP’s title with his lyrical contributions. Channelling some of Brilliant Trees’ woodland ether, Sylvian bounces off Dalt’s stylings with expert synchronicity, both pushing each other to pierce ever deeper into a captivating collage of considered, spiritual finesse.
While A Danger to Ourselves doesn’t shine a light on entirely new territory, Dalt still displays a deft and masterful command of her amorphous compositions, evoking a sensual experience with just the right degree of disquieting prickle that promises to unearth new layers of sonic particles and teased lifeforms deep within her electronic sanctum with repeated listens.
The perfect listening experience: Playing endlessly on repeat while pinning your scrawled journal entries all over the bedroom walls.
For fans of: Translucent, glowing creatures found in the deep sea.
A concluding comment from The Baby: “I think we have my first birthday soundtrack”.
Release date: September 5th | Producer: Lucrecia Dalt and David Sylvian | Label: RVNG Intl
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