Slapping mosquitos off of sweaty necks at midnight in Brooklyn, townhouse light-lattice connects the back yards. The guy next door is a real character — keeps his own bees and experiments with feeding them different flowers to see how it affects the color of their honey. He also has a formidable ghetto blaster that looks like a Pez Dispenser for bricks of C4. The music wafts a few houses down, mostly picks from OSR Tapes, weird “devotionals,” celebrating all forms of cultural psychedelia. It’s a big world out there.
Drink this Yerba Mate stuff you bought because coffee is giving you the shits these days and it’s not quite too late for a little caffeine. Imagine what you would do if you went somewhere calmer, milder, like Spain. What you imagine is probably not like the decaying vignettes from the video for Daga Voladora’s “Like, estrella, favorito.” The vision is paradise seen through brackish water; free time is eaten up tagging old war bunkers, kicking around the plazas, and looking for chill spots out of the immediate public eye. Plaza employs the same technique in her video for label-mate Blanche Blanche Blanche’s track, “Uncrazy.”
I remain in the shadows // because the rest of the people are already in the spotlight
Daga Voladora — the seudónima of singer and multi-instrumentalist Christina Plaza — translates to “flying dagger.” For Chiu-Chium, her first tape out on OSR, Plaza captured every song on a four-track recorder, combining sultry, Spanish swing with cold, decaying drum samples. The lyrics are ever-so-hummable — they practically buzz on your lips. Sweeter than honey. The kind of music you chase through the woods in your sleep, hoping it will lead you to a beach, or a patio with olives and cheese everywhere.
The tape was released on March 16, and is available direct from OSR. If you’re tryna add a little variety to your life, you can also follow Christina on Spanish twitter.
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