Fiat Lux

Tarta Relena – Barcelona-based singers Helena Ros and Marta Torrella – was born in 2016 out of a project to explore and evolve the potentialities of traditional chapel music. A cappella or set against pared-down melodies, their extraordinary vocal flights evoke sea and landscapes, protest, human passion and feminist ferocity as much as spiritual and theological concerns.

Singing in Catalan, Spanish, Greek, Latin, English and Ladino the duo draw from flamenco, jazz, Gregorian chant and the folksong of Catalonia, seeking inspiration from historical characters, including the Virgin Mary and abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen, and original sources. Opening track, ‘El Suïcidi i el Cant’ is an adaptation of a traditional poem by Pashtun women in Afghanistan. ‘Esta Montanya d’Enfrente’ is a Sephardic standard. ‘Safo’ – performed with fellow singers Marina Herlop, Teresa Guisado, Clàudia Ibáñez and Neus Llorens – is based on the love poetry of Sappho of Lesbos. Always intense, at times extreme, Tarta Relena play a close game here, sounding raw and timeless, but also at ease harmonising with edgy electronic envelopes of sound. Catalonia is known to most people – including natives – as a nationalist hotbed; this is the counter-narrative, hybrid, multi-ethnic, searching for deeper roots than flags and flam.