Lucrecia Dalt sits on the bed with one leg tucked beneath her, notebook and Bic ballpoint in hand, logging the otherworldly footage that she and her friends have been filming here on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Her hair falls in dark waves around her face; on each wrist bounces a broad, gleaming bangle. Out on the balcony, a dog-eared copy of a book titled Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia is splayed open on a wicker table, while Dalt’s costume, a glistening ensemble reminiscent of Sun Ra’s intergalactic attire, hangs from the air conditioning unit.
The room is dim as Dalt, filmmaker Aina Climent, and percussionist Alex Lázaro watch unedited scenes from last night’s shoot. Onscreen, Dalt and Lázaro huddle conspiratorially in a limestone cave, murmuring lines in a mixture of Spanish and English. “How long was I gone?” asks Lázaro, his voice soft and mellifluous. “Time? I can’t speak about time,” replies Dalt, a cryptic expression flashing across her face. In another shot, she looks quizzically at him and runs a svelte black mannequin’s hand through her hair. Every few seconds, a cackle erupts from the room in response to the vignettes, which are unsettling, absurd, and slyly funny in a way you can’t quite put your finger on.
Dalt’s rental apartment for the week gives off a real ’80s time-share vibe, with faded orange awnings draped over brutalist angles and curves. The view, though, is as bucolic as the name of the surrounding neighborhood: Costa de la Calma, a secluded enclave of vacation homes. In the distance, the island’s cliffs pitch steeply into the Mediterranean.
The group has assembled on Mallorca to make videos for Dalt’s forthcoming album ¡Ay!—a concept record of sorts about an alien consciousness who visits Earth in a secondhand skin made of epidermal flotsam that has been harvested from the upper reaches of the atmosphere. (Think Bowie’s Man Who Fell to Earth—but made of dandruff.)
“You mean the way they say that dust is mostly human skin?” I ask, trying to get a handle on the idea. “Exactly,” says Dalt. “It wants to have a subjective experience on Earth, so it buys a body made of evaporated skin that circulates in the hydrosphere, where there’s a market. That’s how I imagined it: all the leftover bits of skin.”
This is not entirely new territory for the Colombian-born, Berlin-based musician born María Lucrecia Pérez López; supernatural themes have become more prominent as her music has evolved from the tentative electronic pop of 2012’s Commotus and the cinematic miniatures of 2013’s Syzygy into the billowing atmospheres and bristling textures of her recent work. Her last album, 2020’s coppery, claustrophobic No era sólida, concerned a nascent consciousness that assembles itself out of guttural chirps and gurgles. On 2018’s Anticlines, titled after a type of rock formation—a nod to Dalt’s fascination with geologic time scales—she told the tale of el Boraro, a mythological Colombian beast that sucks the innards from its human prey and inflates their flesh like a balloon.
¡Ay! opens up new imaginative dimensions in her world-building. As a disembodied consciousness, Preta, the album’s extraterrestrial protagonist—played by Dalt in the videos—has no previous knowledge of linear time, gravity, or boundaries of any sort. “She’s experiencing all these sensations for the first time,” Dalt explains. “Containment, perspective. A body of water—it’s the first time she’s seen that. All these things blow her mind.”
To bring me up to speed, she pulls up a rough cut of the “No tiempo” video, which they shot on another part of the island in February. She and Lázaro stand on rocky cliffs, their backs to the sea, wind whipping through their hair. You wouldn’t necessarily know that Preta is a visitor from another dimension. “I’ve always liked things like [Russian director Andrei] Tarkovsky, where you have to construct the story from the information you’ve been given,” she tells me. “It’s not super explicit, like, ‘I’m an alien.’” But it’s clear that something is off about Preta.
Where Dalt’s previous albums have sunk progressively deeper into electronic murk, ¡Ay! is bathed in a soft pastel light. It may be the most conceptually ambitious in her catalog, as well as the most immediately gratifying: She has largely abandoned the experimental, alchemical sounds of her recent past in favor of the acoustic music of her childhood. “Salsa, merengue, bolero, mambo—they really started to grow on me during the pandemic,” Dalt says. “The record was born from a deep necessity to return to the melodies and rhythms that I grew up with.”
Dalt, 41, grew up in Pereira, Colombia, a mid-sized city about 200 miles west of Bogotá. Her mother played guitar and collected records that a salesman would deliver to the house; she was also an amateur audiophile, prone to tucking speakers into hidden corners in the living room. According to family lore, as a baby, Dalt would crawl around seeking the source of the sound. Her father, meanwhile, was a ham radio operator, which might explain her fascination for the molten squeal of shape-shifting analog frequencies. She had long toyed with the idea of making music inspired by the sounds of her upbringing. Now, as she reacquainted herself with those records, with their jazzy warmth and romantic yearning, ¡Ay!’s outline began taking shape.
Writing the album required a shift in methodology. Whereas she might normally begin by processing abstract textures on her machines, this time she sat at the keyboard, studying the chord progressions of the songs she loved. Rather than getting too hung up on the styles’ rhythmic minutiae, she says, “I really wanted to work from the feeling of it, so it was about finding those shapes with keys and voice.”
On ¡Ay!, that feeling is as cozy as a favorite hand-me-down. Congas and stand-up bass ripple through woozy fields of keys; subtle electronic effects shimmer on the margins, all but imperceptible. Bolero rhythms are embedded into the fabric of the reverb, a secret pulse moving beneath the surface of the music. The effect is both vintage and uncanny, like a faded black-and-white photograph of a face you can’t quite make out.
“I thought it was interesting to mix a science-fiction story with a memory of all the music that I listened to when I was little,” Dalt says. “Normally, those lyrics are 100 percent romantic, so I thought it would be interesting to break that narrative.” But ¡Ay! doesn’t completely sever the link with bolero’s romantic roots; she lets the mysterious Preta be our guide to the mysteries of love. One eureka moment came from re-watching John Cassavetes’ 1984 film Love Streams, starring Gena Rowlands—hence the languid “Gena,” an album highlight about everlasting passion. “There’s a scene where she’s explaining to her shrink that love is a stream, it’s endless, it never stops,” Dalt recalls. “I thought that it would make sense for a consciousness that doesn’t think about time to think about love in this way.”
The title of the record also calls back to its vintage inspirations. “It’s an expression that we use a lot in Latin America,” says Dalt. “It’s handy for everything—good, bad, to express pain, contentment. I wanted to use it to break the heaviness of the theme, almost like a joke: ¡Ay!” She laughs, savoring the pointedness of the outburst.
To illustrate, she pulls up Machito y Graciela’s early-’60s hit “Ay José”—a quick burst of horns, then a woman’s voice, half exasperated, half sensual: “Ay José, not that way/Ay José, do it again/Ay José, that’s not it/Ay José, that’s so good!” Everyone in the room bursts out laughing. “Even though it’s science fiction, I tried not only to make it lighter, but to make it fun,” stresses Dalt, smiling.
Dalt began assembling the album’s backstory as she read the 1987 book Mallorca Mágica, a survey of the island’s myths and legends. She suggests that Preta may have arrived via a geological anomaly on Puig de Galatzó, a local mountain known for its strange magnetic properties. (Among other things, it periodically attracts vast numbers of snakes that writhe in tangled masses, for unknown reasons.) In the “No tiempo” video, Preta announces to Lázaro’s cheerfully low-key earthling character, Cuc, “I’m into rocks.” The camera cuts to an image of Preta clinging to the hillside, methodically licking a stone outcropping.
Dalt is into rocks, too. Her Instagram is dotted with geological curiosities: pyrite nodules, limestone shelves, trilobites, basalt diaclasa. Once, she even performed in a centuries-old salt mine. Growing up in Colombia, she could watch a nearby volcano smoking from her window; occasionally, drifting flakes of ash would powder the neighborhood in a gray-white film. Earthquakes were a regular occurrence. “I remember one really intense one, running hand in hand with my sister,” she recalls. “I have this image of a car leaping into the air, and I was like, That’s it.”
Fortunately, that wasn’t it, and after college, working as a geotechnical engineer, she was one of the few members on her team who would willingly strap into a harness and descend 65 feet underground, in a shaft just a few feet wide, to inspect the bedrock below. “Because of the water levels, it might be raining down there,” she says. “I loved that sensation.”
Eventually, she quit her job and moved to Barcelona to pursue a life as a musician. But even then, it seems, the earth’s crust wouldn’t loosen its hold on her: Living above a subway station, she discovered that a magnetic field emanating from underground caused her electric bass to feed back uncontrollably; only by standing perpendicular to the train lines could she silence the hum. Then, some seven years after quitting her job, she says, she began feeling what she describes as a “telluric pull.” She wanted to reclaim that experience of being a geotechnical engineer, work it back into her music, only this time in a narrative way.
By chance, she attended a conference about the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. “They were talking about his idea of time, which is totally not our idea of time”—rather than linear, it’s complex, multi-dimensional, moving in different directions. “It made sense to me, especially thinking about how geology works. The things we keep finding are constantly reshaping our history.” She describes rock layers that bend, break through the surface, and reconfigure the landscape, revealing millions of years of history at our feet. As Preta sings on “Atemporal,” against a backdrop of lilting vibraphone and clarinet: “I recognize myself in that rock timeless/So that time ceases in its surroundings.”
Bundling into Dalt’s rented Fiat 500, light pouring through the open sunroof, the four of us drive through dusty pine groves and past golf courses to reach a nearby cove. Dalt drums on the steering wheel in time to a playlist of inspirations for the album: Pérez Prado’s “I Can’t Get Started,” a languid mambo with a serpentine trumpet melody; Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine,” its sad, silvery chords chipping like flakes of mica; Esquivel’s “Jungle Drums,” a radiant burst of retro-futurist kitsch.
Dalt and Climent are scouting the area for what will be the album’s third video, for “Dicen.” “I want to give the alien the opportunity to really enjoy herself in this one,” Dalt says. “Just going in the water, things that we take for granted—that’s the whole experience for her.”
It’s late afternoon, and a handful of people lie sunburned on the beach as we pick our way across the craggy shoreline, looking for a place to take test shots. A few sailboats lie at anchor, and a man slices across the cove on his paddle board. Dalt dons a long, copper-colored cloak and steps into the water, sandals still on her feet, picking her way around the hundreds of obsidian-black sea urchins lodged beneath rocks slicked with seaweed. “Is it cold?” asks Climent, taking photos from the jagged shoreline above her. “No, it’s wonderful,” Dalt says. “Perfect.”
The scenery is a strange collision of timelines. Across the bay, you can see the tunnel-like formation where they were filming the video for “Atemporal” the night before; it looks like something one of the sandworms from Dune might have burrowed. Pan your gaze to the right, and construction cranes teeter over multi-million-dollar homes rising from the shoreline. A little bit past them, a crumbling, 16th-century watchtower keeps a lookout for pirates.
Now Dalt is standing in a circular tidepool. Her face raised to the sun, she caresses her cheek with the black mannequin’s hand, which Lázaro has retrieved from the car. Her coat crinkling in the golden light, she looks as though she is a part of the rock itself, a flickering emanation of the eternal rendered in glistening calcite and aragonite. Loping reggaeton rhythms float across the rocks from a nearby group of sunbathers, oblivious to the presence of an alien in their midst.
