DJ Python Derretirse

[Dekmantel; 2019]

Rating: 4/5

Styles: deep reggaeton
Others: Anthony Naples, Bad Bunny, Chris Jeday, Project Pablo

As the sun ascends with stunning regularity and undulating light, so Derretirse opens as a warm mouth. These six songs rise up from the heat like wet masses of swollen dough — sublime eventualities of nature. Thick carpets of mosses and lichens unroll in earthen colors. Sticky pollens lick the hands that touch them. To blow a dandelion into the wind: each time is as beautiful as the last.

I am ready to begin the day to “Tímbrame.” I feel I am where I am supposed to be. Fear, which informs my present, regretfully, by way of the past and hypothetically for what has not yet passed, is thrown into relief against this actual moment. It all feels a bit better listening to this music. I am here right now, and I welcome this experience of acceptance, which reframes my perspective of the now. Everybody seems to stop screaming into my ear, and even if I were to continue to hear them, I would put on “Cuando” for us all, not to lull but to usher us toward a new kind of communicative rhythm. A broader frequency.

As DJ Python guides me, I could guide us all into the cool pause between tracks two and three. It is a perfectly placed silence, like a generous gap in a stacked DJ set. Python is well known for crafting stimulating mixes full of joy, lending a seamless DJ sensibility to his album’s edits and cuts. I am a marionette moving bewitched. I am enchanted. My wooden bones begin to rot in the heat of soft dance. That silence suspends me in its gasp, pffff, a little laugh after lovemaking. We are bodies. Where are we? Where was I? I continue on.

As we are in warm weather, so the flesh of “Espero” is held together by overripe fruits hanging heavily from branches and vines. Here, the album’s breath begins to flow backward like when a mouth closes over mine. To kiss a hand to “Be Si To,” even if it is one’s own. To touch a neck, the nape, soft skin on the underside of an arm. Bellies soft with summer fruits: bleeding strawberries, leaking watermelons, creamy mangoes. Dirt is actually the stuff of dreams, and we hope, like the soil, that our bodies can grow gnarly and wild as flowering trees in abandoned groves.

Lately, in the evenings of “Pq Cq,” I go out into the hot garden. The moon rises over my world. I rest in the sweaty grass to watch where the herbs and twisted brambles have grown all tangled together, and everything is dark green. Faces blink out of the bushes. Shimmering whiskers, flashes of fangs, wet eyes, quivering snouts. Maybe it’s Bacchus, the son of Persephone, a peculiar child who laughed ominously in the womb of his mother. Maybe it’s the cat catching her latest field mouse or starling bird or star-nosed mole. Maybe it’s the spirit of the Arcimboldian face peeking out from the cover of Derretirse. I trail the wet grass back inside on my bare feet. I whisper a secret all over the floor. This is music for that, a form of attention, a voice answering a voice.

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