Lucrecia Dalt
No Era Solida

Ballard, if you want to understand post punk, you have to read him, at least that's what that depressed critic says who cites him every two seconds, but I don't, zilch, nada. Could be that when I'm told to do something, I tend not to do it, or maybe it's because the title of one of his novels is the same as the track that opens my favorite album from when I was a kid, and that title is so perfect for me that, for fear of ruining it all, I've left it at that with Mr. Ballard. However, Lucrecia, who is a real capish, and who, evidently, doesn’t have my hang-ups, of course bumps into someone like him. So one day she reads a short story about a musical statue that, destined to be placed in the city center, is refused by the citizens because of its strange appearance and equally strange music it produces. Confined to the garden of a local notable, the statue gradually gains the ability to move and grows in both height and width until, having reached twice its original size, it is destroyed, and its remains and debris are sold off to a scrapyard. After ten months, the citizens are horrified to notice that the music coming from the new courthouse is the same music that once emanated from the statue. How is that possible? Oh, nothing strange, without anyone knowing, the statue's remains were used as recycled material for the construction of the courthouse. Okay, maybe this story means that essence, no matter how much you try to destroy and confine it, always returns in one way or another, or maybe it means something else, who knows? In any case, Lucrecia takes note, no doubt she does...

….

Lucrecia is someone who does a lot of things, this, that, and the other. She's an engineer, for example, and she plays in caves, does field research, collects moments, works with ceramics, and makes her own clothes, which means she's someone who does her homework. But if you look into her eyes, you see a cunning little animal, a mischievous elf, a child sticking out her tongue, all things that have little or nothing to do with homework and that we have seen little or not at all in her albums until now. Don't get me wrong, Lucrecia has always made beautiful stuff, but always a bit too precise. In "No era solida" however, things change and look, it's not about an aesthetic speech, but more about the fact that while you are on the beach, considering with your foot whether the water is too cold or not, someone comes and with a kick in the butt throws you into the water. Because if this is a thoughtfully made album in its premises, with the usual tasks of the usual good girl, it’s also true that it was realized relying on the good star of immediate delivery, one take and that's it. After all, doing the homework well means perhaps arranging things to then possibly dishevel them better? If then you want to know what awaits you, then I'll tell you that "No era solida" is icy loops, noise outlines, and a witch's voice. It's pure and hard avant-garde, the kind that you really have to want, otherwise you'll bump your nose against it. The singing, to say, almost always acts in the form of abstract vocalizations and the music, well, the music is at the very least unbreathable. Last thing, Lucrecia is not alone, but in partnership with a certain Lia, which would also be normal. There's one small problem though, Lia doesn't exist.

...

Locked in the avant-garde basement, Lucrecia fiddles with sound machines, sifts through rosary beads, connects all the dots in her own way. The idea is to stage the chaos of the soul, and those beads and dots are nothing but suggestions captured by an ever-alive sixth sense. The first dot bead is the quest for freer delivery of the singing. So Lucrecia, after listening for a whole afternoon to the fabulous griot queen Fanta Damba, impulsively improvises a witchy babbling made only of pure sound. Imagine a perfect storm with whispers, flashes, and glossolalia discharging into the air. The freedom of the voice brings Damba into Lucrecia's world which is, of course, a bit like bringing the sun into the ice, but the connection is such that what we have is no longer Lucrecia and no longer Damba, but a kind of unknown entity which is the first small step in constructing what we usually call an alter ego, or alias, or Ziggy, or whatever...The second dot bead is a poem by Gloria Anzualda where she talks about the encounter with an abstract entity. And it is at this point that Lucrecia thinks: I want an abstract entity too and therefore I will pretend that there is someone in the basement collaborating with me and I will call that someone Lia...

However, Lia needs a model and the third dot bead is about finding one, stuff that for a capish like Lucrecia is a piece of cake. She just read "A Breath of Life" by Clarice Lispector and the breath of life in question is what a creator gives to their creation/creature. The Adelphi blurb informs us that the two will communicate with "disconnected phrases as in a dream" made up of "raw state ideas, remains of a soul's demolition, temporary ecstasies." Well then, it's decided, Lucrecia will be the creator, Lia the creation/creature. The mission to accomplish is also clear, a kind of season in hell. "No Era Solida," in fact, is an album to listen to in the dead of night suffocating curses. And if some hypnotic moments are like whirlpools where you are nothing but a dot in the middle, the prevailing feeling is that of being stuck in a vain sense of waiting while a thousand gears turn empty. Only the singing passes through the narrow door as Lucrecia whispers in the night's cracks and struggles in chaos...

...

But now let's take a step back to look for another piece of Lia. We are in a museum in Barcelona, and Lucrecia is preparing one of her typical hyper-capish-girl performances when, while she's placing microphones here and there, she suddenly hears a click she knows quite well. It's at that moment that she notices the statue and feels its gaze on her, after all, nailed to a kind of enigma, certain faces speak directly to you...

And then Lia, Lia who has crossed interior landscapes as pure essence ("No era solida", was not solid) now is that statue and speaks, and the fantastic thing is that it tells the journey, that is, tells the album, now though no babbling, no discomfort gramelot, but a spine-chilling spoken word and a damn poem. Which in the end, in a sort of emotional crash, the statue raises its head, the marble neck breaks, and from the wound, memories spread on the floor screaming...

My memories - it says - be careful where you throw them because wherever they mix, they will continue to scream. Ok Lia, Ok Lucrecia, Ok Fanta Damba, Ok abstract entities, now we really have closed the circle and those memories are like Ballard's story statue which even destroyed, mixed, scattered, continues to send out its mysterious music.

And anyway, damn, what a text, a sensation almost like Jim Morrison when you are sixteen and completely uninformed about poetry. And anyway, damn, what a piece, on an icy and severe ambient base Lucrecia declaims her flaming verses until all that's left is the unsettling pulsating of an even more unsettling sound machine that slowly dims. It's Lia's way of saying goodbye, I think, while her words still draw a piece of invisible in the air that will soon fade away.