Lucrecia Dalt Is Manifesting a Collab With Rosalía
Before becoming a critically acclaimed experimental musician and indie-film composer, Lucrecia Dalt worked as a geotechnical engineer in her native Colombia. Strapping into a harness, she would drop 65 feet underground to inspect bedrock, one of the rare members of her team intrepid enough to do so. “Because of the water levels, it might be raining down there,” she told Pitchfork three years ago. “I loved that sensation.”
Born to a musical family in Pereira — her mother was a record collector, while her father toyed with ham radio — Dalt has long been dialed into the unusual frequencies of living. And though she has set down her engineering gear, she still finds a way to examine the world from unique posts. Her 2022 album, !Ay!, follows an alien entity named Preta that descends down to Earth in a host body made of evaporated skin cells from the hydrosphere. (Who else could come up with that concept?) In this fleshy costume, Preta has revelatory experiences of gravity, rushing water, and the vastness of geological time.
Dalt’s new album, A Danger to Ourselves, is a more open exploration of human emotion — love, lust, and fear — germinating out of early messages she sent her partner, British musician David Sylvan. In 2023, she moved from New Mexico to Berlin partially to be with him. There, she learned how to surrender to the madness of the creative process and her emotions: “I’m displaying these possibilities of the human mind, things that you actually might feel when you’re in that process of infatuation.” In the past few years, Dalt also scored the indie black comedy On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and the supernatural folk-horror flick Rabbit Trap, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. In October, she will perform at New York’s Unsound Festival at Lincoln Center. “I am excited to continue working,” she says. “I look forward to making music until forever.”
In the notes you sent along with the album, you wrote, “I secretly wish this record ends up in the brain of Bertrand Bonello, in the cochlea of Rosalía, and the stomach of Claire Denis.” Say more about that.
Those are people I obviously admire very much. Bonello’s House of Tolerance was so beautiful, and I constantly think about The Beast. It’s set in a developed society in which AI has replaced almost all the jobs and humans are seen as too emotional, so the main character undergoes treatment to erase her emotions. During this process, she travels back to past lives to relive lust and love and all that tension to arrive at a present time and then a future time. It’s one of those movies where you’re like, Did I understand everything correctly? I just feel so compelled by directors like that.
With Rosalía, it’s rare to find a mainstream pop artist with that level of reach and also that instinctual capacity to make hits. The decision-making behind every track on El Mal Querer and Motomami is just outstanding. It would be insane if one day I could collaborate or offer anything in my capacity as a producer. And Claire Denis: I love every movie and how she illustrates the rawness and the brutality of human nature.
In your music, I feel a sense of porousness to other art forms. What are your most reliable avenues for finding inspiration?
You meet people who you feel aligned with aesthetically, and the sharing just happens. Have you seen this? Did you check the last movie? Have you discovered these? Art is a big necessity. One little line that I’ve read somewhere in a book can stay with me for a long time.
Is there a line now that you’ve been kind of turning over?
I was reading The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut, and he said that the people he most admires have “this wondrous ability to let their unconscious bleed into what they do. I really think that the highest form of intelligence is possession from outside.” In the book, he is investigating game players and scientists, people propelled by the force of something greater. It’s how I feel when I’m working on an album. It possesses you.
For this album, I would wake up at 4 in the morning, in that kind of state of mind that’s part dream, part reality, feeling the darkness outside and the light coming in. I started to build little environments of things, accumulations of little ideas, and slowly they would start to make sense.
You’ve said the songs on A Danger to Ourselves started with texts.
They were things I was writing to my partner at the beginning of our relationship, because we started out online and I couldn’t see him. I was touring a lot. It was a lot of prose-poetryish stuff.
Your last album, !Ay!, had such a fantastical sci-fi premise. Was it challenging with A Danger to Ourselves to return to the human realm?
The core subjects are about love and impossibility and death. It’s not that I haven’t explored these themes before, but I felt more comfortable doing so through the voice of this alien, Preta. By putting my subjectivity there, I felt freer to talk about nonsense. When you put a very personal song into the world, there’s more responsibility. I even wonder what friends I haven’t spoken to in a long time would think about so-and-so lyric.
How did you overcome the fear of exposure?
I don’t know. Previously, I even felt afraid of performing and exposing the voice at the center of my songs. But I kind of realized I was not trusting my body enough. I was expecting it to excel in a way that it didn’t want to. If you just center yourself and deliver your performance with sincerity and expressiveness, it’s going to be fine. It’s like the example from philosopher George Bataille, “Acéphale,” a figure with its head cut off — I actually don’t know Bataille that well, but I think it’s a beautiful image representing the failure of humanity. When my partner says I’m spending too much time in my head, it’s like, okay, I’ll cut it and then I can spend a little bit more time in your heart. The abuse that your own voice can sometimes have over you is crazy.
What’s your relationship to your body? Are you interested in dance or yoga or anything that helps you feel grounded in the flesh?
Oh yeah. For me, movement is so important. I did ballet for many, many years, and my father’s brothers were highly skilled salsa dancers. My mother says that the first strong memory she has of me as a baby is when she started playing records on the speakers and I would already be dancing. The rhythmical response that I have in my body is evident. [Ourselves contributor] Alex Lazaro and I are both maniac dancers. When we’re not making music, we are cooking and dancing and so on.
I read that your father was an amateur radio operator and that as a kid you were always searching for the sound in the room, which maps really well to the concept of Rabbit Trap, two musicians in the countryside trying to locate this strange music. How were you thinking about the score?
In this case, I wanted to be loyal to synthesizers and tape loops that corresponded to the time of the movie. I went to the synthesizer museum and I spent a day there discovering stuff. The director, Bryn Chaney, showed me several folk songs that he felt belonged to that world. I started listening to them and thinking how I could re-create the feeling. There’s a piece I made called “Fairy Circle” that’s a mixture of many vocal takes and distorted flutes and pulses and synthesizer.
I always think about the film Knife in the Water. It’s one of those beautiful scores that kind of carry the whole movie perfectly with the sound, and I’m always wishing to be able to do that.
You moved from Berlin to New Mexico in 2023. How has being in this new environment changed you? What is your relationship to the land like?
I haven’t had the time yet to fully research. But the vastness of this place is just so incredible. You’re near weird rock formations, and every day the clouds are so intensely different. Lately, I’ve been going for sunset walks, and it’s become like my addiction. Everything smells so beautiful and I’m looking at how the sun hits the mountains over there. In a world where we’re so compelled to just look at our phones, it’s nice to be in a place that’s kind of like, Hey, I’m here in the background and I’m phenomenal.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Related