The Long Count

On Animus, her 2018 debut album, Mexican-American producer-musician Delia Beatriz aka Debit explored metallic soundscapes, frantic club grooves, pulsing sequences and expansive chords. On System, her 2019 EP, she mashed up complex beat sequences and synths leaning heavily on white noise to produce an ethereal tribal music somewhere between house and ambient. For The Long Count, she has distilled all her ideas down to a stripped-back, tuneless, percussion-less lunar vision that sometimes sounds like the Clangers chilling at the end of a rave and, at its unhappiest, closer to Lou Reed’s ruthless 1975 finger-giving Metal Machine Music. Allegedly, the glacial, chiming sounds on the ten tracks (all titled ‘1st Day,’ ‘3rd Night’, ‘7th Day’ etc) derive from research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments – whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets – using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind.

The conceptual art-worthy blurb for the record says she is ‘sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks.’ The material will repel traditionalists, who, by definition, want more of the same. It will depress those who want anything from Méjico to be full of yee-hah-ing big hats and grinning skulls. But if you kill the lights, lie back and let your ears sink into this soundtrack of machine-learning Mayan-inflected abstraction, you might get a wee bit closer to the past while on the aural equivalent of a peyote trip into our collective apocalyptic future. Ambient music isn’t always fucked up or fascinating; it’s often just boring. But there’s madness in the method here, and it’s to Debit’s credit that she is unwilling to compromise, dilute or deny.