Like mischievous clues to a well-guarded secret, we proudly present the second premiere from Lucrecia Dalt’s forthcoming album, Syzygy.
As puffs of smoke pour from the evergreens, beaming headlights cast eerie shadows and a (familiar?) specter sinks into the very darkness from which “Inframince” emerges.
With less than a month to go before its release, Syzygy is now available to pre-order from HEM, and as Dalt prepares for her European tour with Julia Holter, TMT got in touch with the Berlin-based musician to shed some light on her infrathin, woodland experience.
We recently announced that you would be touring with the wonderful Julia Holter, who also features on Commotus. How much of an influence has she been on your work, and what are your anticipations about sharing a stage with her?
Julia has an admirable and rare capacity to make pop music in which expectation is morphing incessantly, music that runs on its own, that doesn’t need to go back necessarily to something already explored. Those things to some extent are now part of my music process. Or at least when in doubt while structuring songs, I ask myself: do I really need to go back to this melody?
I can’t wait to start this tour with her, it’s really really exciting.
The premiere for “Glosolalia” was very well received. What does it feel like to finally have some material from Syzygy in the public domain?
Strange. Ideally, I would have preferred that a first approach to the record was as a whole. Syzygy at some point became this structure that was running on its own, with an autonomy gained by integration. When isolating tracks, I just wonder if they still contain a certain identity to the whole. I really don’t know what one can extrapolate from them to that existing whole from which they were subtracted. There could be hilarious extrapolations, that I wish I could know, but that unfortunately I will never know. To my friends, I’ve only shown the whole record from beginning to end.
Your new video for “Inframince” has a very unsettling theme, where you only appear for a few short frames. What can you tell us about your aspirations for the video?
This may or may not be me; if there’s something we (directors Alejandro and Luis) wanted to explore in the video was this thin line between what you see and what’s really there, what light reveals or what shadows hide, the boundaries and the edges in dark-luminous worlds. These ideas are just other possibilities of the “infrathin” concept. Duchamp said that this notion was impossible to define; one can only give examples of it, like the warmth of a chair that has just been left, when the tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it…. from there, with just a little of creativity, you can set a universe of infrathins.
“Inframince” is the second song on Syzygy, and it makes an immediate departure from the prickly heat of “Glosolalia” into some kind of gorgeous, drawn-out humidity. What can people expect to follow on from that once the album is released?
“Inframince” departs from “Glosolalia” to an interlude called “Soliloquios.” The interlude then gives life to the next track “Vitti,” which is a kind of homage to Monica Vitti for her part in the movie Deserto Rosso. She’s trying to survive in the modern world of cultural neurosis and existential doubt. But! But! There’s still a possible exotic paradise after that; Not everything is necessarily delirium here!
Lucrecia Dalt’s Syzygy is out October 15 via Human Ear Music.
• Lucrecia Dalt: http://www.lucreciadalt.com
• Human Ear Music: http://www.humanearmusic.de
More about: Lucrecia Dalt
