From Buh Records out of Lima, Peru, which specializes in contemporary and archival experimental releases from Peru, Latin America, and the world at large, a very intriguing album from experimental pop maker Alejandra Cárdenas’s Ale Hop moniker.
Ale Hop consciously interrogates an unsettled notion of self in Bodiless. The release’s title is especially befitting for music that detaches itself from any stable sense of presence while at the same time totally suffusing itself with identity. These songs do not seem to want to fix themselves into tidy completion, instead, they explore extraterrestrial forms—at once familiar because of our narrativizing efforts, but still a bit fantastical and speculative and conspiratory. Full of an inherent unknowing, which she embraces.
Cárdenas is currently based in Berlin and bits of what could burst into a dark club beat twitter forth at moments, as do skittering drums, and other partial rhythms that resist resolution. The idea of resolution is too tidy and artificial. She does not want things to be so set under the umbrella of a term. Here, everything feels tense and poised, held like a face in a fascinatingly stoic expression that breaks for a moment into a look more easily understand, as in tracks like “As you seek faintly the sure”, a straightforward guitar-based pop song that gathers together the fragments of the previous three tracks.
The collage of the album keeps spreading beyond notions of borders. It amalgamates so many familiar sounds but each still retains a vague origin. The most familiar might be her voice, sometimes whispering in barely-there poetry, sometimes singing, sometimes letting itself whine and wheeze, and often sent through a filter that elicits the feeling of that after-mentioned otherworldly visitor.
There is safety in uncertainty.
More about: Ale Hop
