Q&A: The cerebral Colombian experimentalist takes on new loves and new landscapes on A Danger to Ourselves, shedding the conceptual worlds of her previous albums.
What makes a song sexy? There’s the obvious lyrical matter, yes, and a closeness of the voice and the breath in your headphones. But there’s something else as well—a certain slipperiness, a feint, a game, an intensity. As the old standard goes, you know it when you hear it.
Lucrecia Dalt’s music may not immediately strike a listener as sexy. The Colombian-born musician’s spacious, layered production has as much in common with Tom Waits and Cosey Fanni Tutti as it does with a new class of Spanish-speaking experimentalists, such as AMORE and Mabe Fratti. But there’s something seductive to Dalt’s music, like you’ve tossed a coin down a well and, in exchange, the witch at the bottom will sing you a song. Her new record, A Danger to Ourselves trickles, hums, and cackles. Born out of a move from Berlin to New Mexico, as well as a generative new creative and romantic partnership with Japan’s David Sylvian, who appears as a producer on the album, the new songs eschew the elaborate world-building of her former work for something more primal—she describes the album as emerging from the “abyssal realm of erotic delirium.”
While the album’s musical influences slither between ranchera devotionals, doo-wop snapping, slowed-down dembow beats, and shivery pop, Dalt’s lyrics are largely concerned with risk, danger, and desire. The album’s opening track, “cosa rara,” featuring Sylvian, is dubby and tensile, following a couple on a road trip to the end of the world. There are two sides to this coin. Dalt sings, “adoración total/cosa rara hoy” (“Total devotion / A strange thing nowadays”). Sylvian follows her: “I’m plummeting slowly / Dosed in dopamine / The walls are thin / My nerves are shot / I’m vulnerable and I know it.”
The sensation of falling appears throughout A Danger to Ourselves. Dalt and Camille Mandoki’s haunting backup vocals on the song sound like wind rushing through your ears. Other songs like “hasta el final” and “divina” are pure adoration. “Caes” found inspiration in the work of Cuban-American performance artist Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas series seared the contours of the artist’s body into the earth—she later fell 33 stories to her death from her Greenwich Village apartment, a crime for which her husband at the time was tried but later acquitted. The song took on new meaning when, on the same day the song was released, Dalt experienced an unexpected, near-fatal seizure that has triggered a reevaluation of many aspects of the songwriter’s life.
If it all sounds quite cinematic, it’s not a mistake: Dalt, who alludes to Leos Carax and David Cronenberg on the record, has just finished her first film soundtrack, out later this year. Paste caught up with Dalt after an early listening party for A Danger to Ourselves to discuss New Mexico, Georges Bataille, musical collaboration, Chloë Sevigny, and moving beyond fear in art.
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Paste Magazine: You’re from Colombia, you lived in Berlin for a long time, but recently you made a big move to New Mexico. How did that happen?
Lucrecia Dalt: I was very ready to move out of Berlin, because I felt like I completed a cycle. I was living there for 11 years, and there was a moment in time that I felt I needed a closer sensation to something that I could call home that I wasn’t feeling there. I guess it has to do with many things. Growing up in Colombia, I was craving more sun. I was craving more time to just be still. I met someone who was living in New Mexico, and it felt like the perfect situation to try it out. I’ve been there only for a year and a half. I have my studio at home. That’s the way I like it. And Dave [Sylvian] does too. He’s a musician.
I only tried once to have a separate studio space from the living space, and I didn’t like it because I love the freedom of, if you wake up at four in the morning and you feel inspired, you just do it and not to having the interruption of a drive or a thing that you need to do to be able to get there. Or once you get there, maybe you’ve lost the state of mind that you were in. It’s a very stimulating environment for me as a creative person.
And would you say you’re like that kind of musician where inspiration strikes or do you have a routine? Do you do certain things to get yourself in the creative headspace?
I think both. I think the main thing is to make a decision to dedicate time to something, but sometimes it happens spontaneously. I start to recognize when my brain starts to shift to a new phase that is going to be conducive to a path towards an album, a writing piece. Right now I’ve been on the road, and on the plane I’ll start to write ideas, just write sentences or stuff like that. I haven’t been writing anything until last month, actually, since the seizure. I’ve been writing a lot. I feel it rewired my brain to be creative again. I don’t know if that is even possible, but that’s more or less how I feel and I’m enjoying that. Right now, I know that I have to dedicate this time to honor the release because it’s what is happening. After that I can start thinking about getting creative again, which is my favorite spot.
So you go through phases, and then you activate?
Exactly. You need to absorb as well: new things, new thoughts, new ideas. I’m not against being creative all the time, but not if it’s forcing yourself to be creative instead of just allowing things to be. I finished this album last year in October, and since then I’ve been doing very little creative work except helping friends produce—which is creative too, but it’s different—or working along with my partner. But not a dedicated, personal compulsion. I start to form, and I look forward to that.
Have you ever gone through a prolonged phase of writer’s block?
I wouldn’t call it that. It’s just a response to forcing yourself to do work that’s not right; you’re not allowing your system to self-regulate, so it’s coming out naturally. I try to be disciplined, but I have this conflict between my heart and brain. How much do I attend to the engineer’s brain trying to structure things and work on ideas that are very quantized? I try to find the balance there and also allow intuition to take the biggest space so I can be true to myself artistically. But it’s something that I only decided to understand recently. Before that, I would be forcing myself more to work because maybe I needed to pay my rent, I needed to follow these steps to be able to survive. Right now, I still have that mechanism of awareness that I need to pay my rent, but it’s less desperate. I’m more stable.
When you’re not in that creative space, what does your day-to-day look like?
Cinema has been the biggest joy for me. I just enjoy people, conversations. I like sharing space with two, three people max. Big gatherings are a little bit complex for me. I’m aware of everything that is happening, and it becomes overwhelming. I guess that is an ADHD thing or whatever. But I like the dedicated attention of just sharing with one person. That you can connect on many levels of intimacy: sharing music, sharing ideas, thoughts, weird concepts or just chilling, going for a hike.
That landscape I’m in is so mesmerizing. I guess it has to do with my age, too, the synchronicity of age and time. I can just sit here and, and it’s so beautiful. It sounds funny, but I don’t know if I would’ve when I was younger.
That makes a lot of sense with the music itself, because the soundscape is not very wide. It’s much deeper. There are spare percussive sounds that are layered. It doesn’t necessarily try to overwhelm me but invites a deeper style of listening.
I remember I went to a lecture with Cosey Fanni Tutti, she was playing Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” on two insane speakers. I love going to shows, but I feel like the energy that you put into production is not the same energy you have in a show. It’s a completely different thing. I love both, but with producing, I could be spending a whole day just trying to place one little detail in the right spot for me. Working with the reverb—this is right, but it has to come and then grab you and then go to a hard EQ and so on.
I spent a lot of time, I guess it would be called sound designing, but I just call it musical decision-making because it’s fundamental. Without that little element, the song doesn’t make sense to me. There is all the structure, like in “cosa rara,” there is a little bumpy filter, and the whole song makes sense to me because of that or because of that little breath at the end. Everything becomes the composition in that way.
I love that, because of modern computers and technology, we have the chance to do that. I am amazed that back in the day, there were bands that could do so much and have so much nuance, like Godley & Creme or 10cc. They did so much with just tape. Marta Sologni is one who inspires me in that process of simplicity, of still using technology that imposes its limitations, but being creative within that. But I just love the versatility of computers. I just love to be able to do things very fast. But, also, I love to complement that with other things. I have a tape machine, and I love the crunchiness and the saturation that it adds.
How much of the songwriting is that meticulously planned layering, and how much is more collaborative and improvisational?
I had a lot of collaborations, but most of them came to do exactly what I wanted them to do. Yeah. Like the baseline is this, you just have to play it. If you want to add some flavor to it, suggestions, feel free, especially with Alex [Lazaro] and Cyrus [Campbell] as well as David in the mixing, allowing everyone to contribute with their true nature.
When you choose the right collaborators, you just don’t have to make any effort, and you can feel that immediately. I remember bringing sheet music to Cyrus, and I started to feel like he was vibing more with the intuitive process, which is better for me. When I started to feel that switch, I was like, “You don’t need this paper, right?” And he was like, “No, I don’t,” and then he started to be free. He started to be himself. He started to respond to what the song needed, and that’s the best thing.
I feel connected with musicians that you can feel a great deal of. They’re insanely talented and experienced. Cyrus plays every weekend with different people. You can feel that he has the sensibility and the intuition of someone that just knows what to do, which not all trained musicians have unfortunately. I’m not trying to put myself in a better place. I just feel it’s a different approach. My music is not about being an expert of your craft but being intuitive and passionate and resourceful.
I’m curious about your experience collaborating with your partner. I’m really interested in couples that make art together: Chris [Carter] & Cosey [Fanni Tutti] or John Balance and Peter Christopherson from Coil. Have you ever created with a romantic partner before? How does it change things for you?
In the past, I have collaborated with a partner. Every relationship—even if it’s not a partner—every creative relationship is just very unique and different, and you have to adapt to how people feel safe in the space with you. David feels safer when he’s left alone. Our version of sharing is listening to stuff together, discussing it. We share ideas, and then he goes to his space, which is his safest way to work. I feel fine with that, and I also feel fine working hands-on with someone in the room and which I do with Alex or Cyrus.
I feel lucky with the collaborators that I’ve met like Camille Mandoki. She’s my best friend. She’s an absolutely incredible musician. She’s producing an album right now, and she came to visit us. We recorded some stuff together. To have that trust is incredible—that someone can trust you in your decision-making.
Eventually, I would love to do more production for other people. But I would love it if it’s in a way that the person can understand what I can bring to the mix. It’s so different with everyone to share that space. There has to be a level of trust and intimacy that maybe it’s only possible with people that you really care about or that you intuitively feel good with. You trust the process, and then you start to discover what flows. I love it when you can develop a relationship and then from there you can work.
Do you ever butt heads, disagree, or have different styles?
Oh yeah, it’s only natural. I love to be challenged by the propositions of other people. I know that my first reaction is always. No, it was good as it was. It didn’t need anything. But then I wait, I allow myself some time, I listen and then I can have perspective and say, “You know what? I think you’re right.”
Sometimes the consensus of possibilities is exactly what a track needs. It’s very nice that you are directing the whole thing, that your vision is still there, but maybe one thing will surprise you. One effect that David added, for example, to “el exceso según cs.” He added such a crazy effect at the end, and then I started to love it. I was so thankful that he did come as more of a co-producer, in a sense, which is the first time that I had that. Up to that point, I’ve been the ultimate decision-maker. In this one, David was flowing a little bit more with me in that space. And I really like that.
When do you decide to sing in English, and when do you decide to sing in Spanish?
Slowly, things just present themselves. I don’t know how to explain it.
It’s intuitive.
It’s very intuitive. For instance, “mala sangre,” the whole second part, the spoken part is a text that I wrote as an exercise in trying to write a story of two lovers and an anomaly that they find. This is inspired by something that I was reading at the time: Crash by J.G. Ballard. I really like the versatility of spoken word. By living with David, I’m starting to learn more of the versatility, being more free to accommodate words to a song. My intuition tells me that maybe for our next record I will have more tools to adapt a text to a song more freely, instead of the other way around, which is usually what I do.
There is a nebula of ideas and thoughts that I’m accumulating while I’m making the album that is influenced by books I’m reading and thoughts I’ve been having and conversations with David. We go very deep talking about consciousness and Buddhism, in that sense of transcendence and that you don’t die, you just change state. Sometimes it’s two worlds: at first they look parallel, but then there’s crossings between them. Somehow musically, they try to interconnect.
The lyrics in the album are pretty wide-reaching. You bring in Crash and also Orpheus and Georges Bataille. But there’s also through lines and currents, a lot of them about risk and desire and eroticism. Do you think of it as a sexy album? What is sexy music to you?
I understand why you asked that question. I wouldn’t say sexy, but more sensual. Allowing yourself to be more literal about sensuality. I don’t feel like it was different in ¡Ay! The sensuality is there, it’s just that the story was so alien and so not personal. That maybe feels a bit more contradicting. Or maybe I was scared to put the alien in that space. For this one, it’s just not being afraid to expose your feelings, what you are experiencing at a moment in time. And for this one, it felt right to explore it that way.
Sometimes the randomness of thoughts [seem like they] could not be connected, but they are. The concept of the acéphale comes from a poem I wrote to David, saying, “I wanna cut your head so that you can stop thinking that much, and you connect more with your heart. There is another song that explores that idea of trying to reclaim the space of not allowing to your head and your thoughts to win, but going back to a space that allows you to also feel.
Is it “el exceso según cs”?
Actually, that one was inspired by a book from Colombian writer Andres Caicedo. It’s funny, I’ve read that book at different times in my life and every time, depending on the moment, I imagine the face of someone different. She’s a woman that feels very comfortable in her body, in her own self. So when I started to read it again when I was making this album, I was imagining Chloë Sevigny as the character in the book. I don’t know why. That’s why it’s called “el exceso según cs.” I didn’t want to explicitly say it, but I like to think about why it was triggered by her. I feel like she’s chosen a way to live life that is very free, even in the eyes of the media.
I’m interested in the idea of sensuality and embodiment in the album because some people might come to it and not immediately read it that way. They might think it’s a little more mysterious or serpentine, but there is something to that because I think eroticism has to be a little more obscured in a certain way. You can’t put everything out there. There’s a game to it.
Yeah. And how does that happen and in which contexts? If you’re lucky to have unusual ways to explore your sensuality that are not conventional. I don’t even know what that means, though, because I feel like every relationship brings its own world of exploring the senses, exploring your limitations, your body, your presence, your capacity to share the perspective of the other and so on. In this case, it’s been quite illuminating in that sense.
To me, your lyrics feel like incantations in many ways, calling something in or banishing something like in “covenstead blues” or “the common reader.”
That one is definitely a command to the self because I sometimes need reminders as well that I shouldn’t be so strict and I need to loosen up. My collaborative partner Alex [Lazaro] is a constant reminder of that. He’s such a free spirit, and I absolutely love that capacity to just be in the moment. It doesn’t matter what’s going on. He’s a good reminder that we are so indoctrinated right now. We are told what we need to do, how we need to behave, so much so that everything is becoming a little bit too sterile. And this is a command to myself against that.
Juana Molina, who intervenes here, wrote that part herself, and she goes along with it. She’s the perfect one to say that because she was very big on TV when she was young as a comedian, and then she became a musician. Her take on life and social media is so admirable. I’m mesmerized by her capacity to laugh. So, in a way, it is a reminder to the self to get out of that thought loop that is killing the vibe and killing you.
“Covenstead blues” is not specifically to any one person. It’s about anything that threatens your capacity to have tranquility, to have control, to not have fear. I have the capacity to blow it up because it is a “malignant goddess.” There’s a joy in writing something so crooked . If you apply it to a person, it’s fucked up. But you can apply it to the thing that creates your insecurities, either through a person or through thought.
What are the things that you’re casting out? That you’re blowing up?
I think fear is a big one, right? We’re living in a moment in which fear is being implanted in us constantly everywhere. So it’s a question of how much you allow that narrative to be imposed on you. Where I live, sometimes I want to throw my phone away and burn it, just for the pleasure of feeling what it feels like to not receive that information every day, to liberate myself from it.
There are days that I don’t check anything, on purpose. I just try to observe, go to a cafe, go for a ride, and leave the day just like that. We have the opportunity right now. We are here to choose how to live, and yet we’re choosing to suffer a lot. It makes you wonder. One thing is to try to make yourself useful to others who are suffering. But another thing is to consider how much you allow the outside to make you suffer, too. I think it goes around. It moves around there.
Do you have any projects currently in the works or unfinished projects lingering in your life right now?
I finished the score of a movie called The Rabbit Trap that already premiered at Sundance. It’s a very unique situation because the movie is about a woman in the ’70s that is making electronic music in a cabin somewhere. She takes everything to work there and with her partner, and they start to go through all these psychological issues by being there, plus the enchantment of the place and so on. I was lucky to compose both the music that she was making plus the score. That was a very long project. I started working on it a couple of years ago, and it’s now coming out this year. It’s very nice when you work on a score because you get to force yourself to be in a slightly different consciousness and work from there with the input of someone else’s vision.
Because you’re such a cinephile, if you could do a score for any filmmaker, who would you wanna work with?
Oh, that’s very hard. Claire Denis, but also that would be intrusive because she found the perfect music for her films. Trouble Every Day is one of my favorite music scores, along with Mica Levi’s Under the Skin.
[Bertrand] Bonello is one of my favorite filmmakers. It’s one thing to imagine it but another thing to translate it. Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, has a great soundtrack by Robert Levon Been [from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.] Lucrecia Martel, a great Argentinian filmmaker. There’s a lot of Mexican cinema coming out right now that I love. Obviously, I would say something like David Lynch because he’s been the basis of all the weird thinking that we have and is so fundamental to my ways of seeing the world differently. I guess I would love to collaborate with someone who simply feels that my music is the same frequency, vibrational range, as their art, so we can create something together.
