Daniela Huerta - Soplo

A Closer Listen

Soplo may be Daniela Huerta‘s first album proper, but over the past few years she has produced a steady string of distinctive releases: singles and EPs, music for installations and dancers, AV collaborations and improvisations.  Perhaps the most memorable: a 40-minute mix of female musicians inspired by female French painters of 1730-1830.  While this was billed under her own name, Huerta is popularly known as the DJ Baby Vulture.

Soplo (Spanish for “breath”) also has a unique origin.  The music was born as the score for a pair of short, “politically charged” films from Iván Argote, and have been reworked for this release to form a new, unified whole.  When subtracted from the context of images, the musique concrète stands on its own, hallucinatory and impressionistic.  The album begins with the most modest of field recordings – the splashing of water, a forest of birds – but will soon run far afield.  Light notes enter as the water continues to flow; we are entering a different river, a river of sound.

Huerta’s voice appears for the first time in the second track, whispery and mysterious.  The music folds around her like a jet stream.  A torrent of water drowns her out, then falls silent, abruptly, at the end of the piece, giving way to drips and droplets in the next.  It seems a hurricane is always on the horizon, a possible metaphor, the interpretation left up to the listener.  The tone is disquieting, especially when the voices are broken into fragments and whoosh by like trains.

“Gloria” introduces hints of a mass, processed and distorted.  One might say the same about the message of faith in the modern world, mangled by its followers.  In Huerta’s piece, the undefined holy breaks through like light through stained glass, producing a raw form of awe.  Traffic passes in “Hálito” (which also means breath), acting as a second drone.  “Fondo” begins like a dance piece, with a defined tempo but an aura of darkness.  The dissonant strings sound like those of a detuned harp, furthering the impression of religion gone wrong.  At the end, everything is engulfed in an electronic cloud.

In the closing “Levitar,” pebbles are swept across the shore in a series of waves.  Small stones are scattered, then reclaimed.  One may seek to understand, or one may simply surrender to the tide, and allow this river to carry one away.  (Richard Allen)