Interview: LUCRECIA DALT

SYMBIOGENESIS

At first I want to congrats you about your recent work. Album Anticlines is a masterpiece. So, I want to you ask, how did you approach to this particular structure on a album? This magnific mixture of spoken words, visions, sounds ...all those instrumental moments, that demonstrate preceding concepts?
Thank you so much! I like to work with process and frame a starting point that is full of information, intuitions, ideas. For this album I wanted to inquire on ideas about edges, boundaries, what a body is, where it begins, where it ends and all this info fed the texts and the music.

You've written, recorded and mixed the album. Yet, could we say you are a kind of a songwriter, or in many ways a storyteller, or a musician, or...Which of these artistic expressions suits you best?
All of them, at once, separately as well.

Album is extremly gently made; the piece Tar is amazing, with gentle, breath like rhythm and subversive lyrics, where you sing:we touched only as atmospheres touch. How do you combine lyrics with music? What comes first? What is your first impulse? Idea? For this album the lyrics came first. First I made a document full of ideas, thoughts, pieces of text, images, transcripts from conferences, poems, and with that document I met with my friend and collaborator Henry Andersen with whom I wrote the lyrics. After having done that I started to make the music. My first impulses or ideas are usually rhythmical ones, with very basic melodies, and with that I started to see how to use the lyrics by improvising along with these first rhythms.
Is it consciousness or is it matter; you asked at one moment during the performance at CTM Festival in Berlin. I asked you this, because the questions is still very relevant in your work till nowadays. What do you think?
Well, both consciousness and materiality have been relevant to the framework of ideas that informed the album, in that case I'm wondering about where and what exactly a Boltzmann brain is and where could it manifest.

In the opening song Edge in lyrics you depart from Colombian myth El Boraro, an Amazonian monster, who turns its wictims insides to pulp before sucking them dry and inflating their bodies like balloons lifelessly float away. „What am I but an edge?" you ask me./ „What am I but an edge?" you ask me? What do you think? Are any possible answers to that cinemascope atmosphere?
Well, it's a metaphor that could be applied to any kind of abused body.

There are 6 poems on the album and you don't sing them, you tell us the story. So I want to know, what is your take on spoken word in music? It's storytelling, it's performing, acting but it's algo singing. Speaking is actually a very complex form of singing to me. Take for example the piece Analogue Mountains, if you listen to the first word "mineral" I'm going up and down almost three semitones.

I made many interviews with Gudrun Gut and I appreciate her work and devotion to the female artists. When did you met her and what do you think about her, her work, working possibilities at Berlin art music scene...?
I wonder myself to this that what would have happened if she had not contacted me on myspace 12 years ago to be part of a compilation. Gudrun is such a wonderful person and artist, there are few female artist with such a trajectory and history representing us. She's impulsed so many artists. I still remember a conversation we had in a taxi cab in Berlin like 10 years ago, we were talking about ambition, her words had a big impact on me at that moment that for sure impulsed me to pursue my career, something I will always appreciate and will always be thankful for.

When and how did you start making music at all? How did your path grow...from „ordinary" pop singing to making music with the machines, loopes, sounds? That's a whole biography in one question! Let's see, I started making electronic music in Colombia in 2004 already with ableton live. I started to very gradually add different elements, guitar, bass, synths. I worked with loops from day one, and I still do but they pass through lots of feedback and processing.

How do you relate to machines when creating music?
Endosymbiotically!

With whom do you collaborate the most?
My most frequent collaborator now is my dear friend and mega talented visual artist Regina de Miguel. Our most recent collaboration was a contemporary opera visual performance presented at HKW in Berlin.

What's or who are your great inspirations in life and in your artistic work? You position yourself as a curator of influences, the dam for many creative streams. Tell me, please, something more about these influences?
The vary from time to time, I don't think I have a longtime steady influence, all the things I have liked in the past add to how I approach art. For this album my influences were Alice Fulton, Karen Barad, Mechthild Von Leusch, Laurent Fairon, Lena Platonos...

Does it bother you, when someone compare your approach to the art, making noises, music, inventing new sounds, prodicing,... to the Laurie Anderson, for instance? What do you think?
It doesn't bother me, I admire her work, but I don't see a point in doing so. Our contexts are so different, we have such different backgrounds and probably very different intentions, but yeah I see it's easy to make that connection while what we do is reduced to these two categories: spoken word, female artist.

I read that you are happy to work on a project Announcing Amplify Berlin; can you tell me, please, something more about this project; what are your main issues in the project?
It is a creative program for Berlin-based emerging musicians happening in ACUD Macht Neu. There are six mentors for the first call, each of us taking one month, I will be there for the month of November. The call for applications opens on April 17th at Amplify Berlin.

What are your future plans, Lucrecia? How will you preparing a live set for Anticlines? Any tour in Slovenia, maybe?
My set for Anticlines is ready! I'm performing it now, and will do so throughout the year. I probably start gathering the first ideas for a new album. And yes, I hope I can come back to Slovenia, I liked it there so much. Last time I went there was to work on a project with Dragan Živadinov, and that was insanely interesting.

Varja Velikonja
(Rock Obrobje, maj 2018)