¡Ay!

¡Ay!, the seventh solo release from Colombian-born, Berlin-based musician and producer Lucrecia Dalt, is an album of twin concepts. The first is the story it sets out to tell, that of the extra-terrestrial entity Preta and her navigation of earthly temporality. The second is Dalt’s own childhood in Pereira, a city in the foothills of the Andes, and the musical memories formed there that still echo through her work decades later.

Elements of Latin American music are present but never in full form – snatches of bolero, salsa, merengue and mambo can be heard across the album’s ten tracks but always as something far-off, half-remembered and hallucinatory. Opener ‘No Tiempo’ offers trumpets and woodwind trills, overlain with Dalt’s languorous vocals and backed by decelerated tumbaos. ‘Dicen’ is a subtle, swinging bolero decorated with sparse percussion, grinding distortion, sci-fi synth bubblings and more spectral singing from Dalt. The key to ¡Ay!’s hauntological atmosphere comes from Dalt’s collaboration with percussionist Alex Lázaro. The two worked together to slow-down and skew those familiar rhythmic patterns into alien shapes. Even on ‘Bochinche’, the most lucid of the bunch, close-listeners will discern an ethereal high-pitched drone behind its pretty vocal harmonies and stripped-back mambo. A masterful mixing of memory and sci-fi mythology.