“We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. ‘It must be up there somewhere on the horizon,’ we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet.”
– William Bryant Logan, from his book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth
When we try and picture Lucrecia Dalt’s studio process for any of her amazing previous albums, it’s hard not to picture her in a dark room, watching arthouse cinema on a huge screen, for hours on end. But with her new album out May 4 on RVNG Intl., Dalt has left her claustrophobia inside and stepped out into a rocky landscape. Anticlines finds the experimental artist mapping mountains and sedimentary formations, yet peeling them back to discover more about the formations of our own bodies, our own skin.
Giving us a tantalizing teaser for what’s in store on Anticlines is Dalt’s newly-released video for its first single, “Tar.” In the video, over a haunting loop of synthesized percussion, Dalt’s floating head undergoes a topographical scan. “Passing from air/ Into water into honey/ Into tar,” she enunciates as her form slips and slides from existence, the colors of her skin and flesh revealing themselves as they are eroded by the liquefying effect.
“We never could locate a skin or/ Bone dream/ There just ain’t nothing to press or/ Be pressed by”
Dalt’s signature moogerfoogered sounds are still highly present, as is her unforgettably eerie voice, but Anticlines promises a journey both external and corporeal with Dalt’s audial messages. Much like her Lynchian video for 2013’s “Inframince,” the video companion to “Tar” (directed by Charlotte Collin) is a dark and foreboding portrait, both organic and metallic.
Watch that video again and again down below — just like we’ve been doing — pre-order the album from the RVNG Intl. shop, and check out the nominally-relevant cover art and tracklisting for the new album down below.
Anticlines tracklisting:
01. Edge
02. Altra
03. Tar
04. Atmospheres Touch
05. Errors of Skin
06. Analogue Mountains
07. Axis Excess
08. Indifferent Universe
09. Concentric Nothings
10. Helio Tanz
11. Glass Brain
12. Liminalidad
13. Eclipsed Subject
14. Antiform
More about: Lucrecia Dalt
