A Closer Listen
A spoken word is often the patchwork of many broken words, an atlas of breakages that are magically woven together through the thread of memory and embodied trauma: personal, social, private, existential, communal, or other. Spoken word in music is a territory of softly spoken harshness. It comes as a lineage of often female-led subtle acts of revolution, where to speak the word is to give voice to power and existence, against years of covered up socially imposed silence and inability to speak out, up and within, one word at a time.
Peruvian-born, Berlin-based Alejandra Cárdenas’s (aka Ale Hop) A Body Like A Home skillfully rides the wave of speaking the word out, through a borrowed language and a thick kaleidoscopic cluster of memories, trauma and histories that guide the listener in a time that stretches and shrinks, to borrow Cárdenas’s own writing, included in the poetry chapbook, accompanying the release.
A Body Like A Home is a testimony of an artist in a process of metamorphosis, holding a broken mirror and facing the many truths that emanate from the reflections, captured in words and embraced through improvised sequences of fluctuating guitars and electronics, field recordings and archival sounds, with notable contributions by Gibrana Cervantes and Laura Robles on violin and percussion. In the sea waves of sound, Cárdenas’s own voice stands as a beacon, periodically shedding light across the dark soundscape, illuminating softly the shadows of the broken reflections, never the source, just the echoes of the ripples of memories and the slow secret labor of turning into something else (The Bridge, Poetry Chapbook).
What is the point of remembering, let alone recording life? asks Cárdenas in the opening piece “On Memory”, with words taken from the same titled poem. The challenging question is raised to unravel what is hidden underneath the thick skin of colonialist historization and beautification of a nation’s own past and struggles. This theme resurfaces at different parts across the 13 pieces including the wonderful “Motherland” where Cárdenas places the listener in the driver’s seat, a guitar slowly raises as the voice gradually becomes drowned in it. The national becomes personal as the private wounds of abuse and trauma are entangled with a country’s legitimized decline.
This longing and lingering for floating across the thick mud of history is, to Cárdenas’s own words, to rehearse not drowning alone (Anatomy of A straight Line, Poetry Chapbook) creates a whirling listening experience where pieces like the beautiful story of “Evangelina” or the same-titled “A Body Like a Home” create a safe space of emotional clarity and “Anatomy of a straight line”, “Inward” and “Dream of Fire” a canvas of introspection and grief.
The instrumental pieces “Glass Skin”, “Early Road”, “Untamed” and “Tear Gas Clouds”, “When We Were Diamonds” (co-composed with Gibrana Cervantes) and the closing track “Going South” extend the thick and deep atmosphere of the album with passing cultural and traditional references, rhythms, melodies and field recordings echoing Cárdena’s motherland.
“A Body Like A Home” is a perhaps one of the most sincere, intense and intimate releases I have listened to so far in 2025; one that deserves many repeated listenings and one that will stay with me as a beautiful example of an album combining spoken word and music, again a testimony of a female artist who adds a softly-spoken crack in the thick wall of silence. (Maria Papadomanolaki)
Tue Nov 11 00:01:15 GMT 2025