My favorite genre is no genre at all.
It has been some time since I wrote about the fascinating genre-less music of classically trained Catalan composer Marina Herlop. Too long, as the last mention here by me was in my review of the Rockport Atria II back in 2023 and her album Pripyat was included in My Favorite Albums of 2022. Too long, indeed. Her records have also shown up on a number of Stephen Mejias’ #NewMusicFriday lists. Of course they have.
Dja Dja is Marina Herlop’s latest, self-released earlier this month, and it is a wild wild ride that brought to mind Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos and or Lucrecia Dalt with a hint of Bjork (and a little Magic Flute) due to its expansiveness expressed through sounds and centuries.
From the album notes:
Conceived as a single, unbroken body of work in which every track answers to the others, Dja Dja is the most architecturally ambitious thing Herlop has made, a giant sudoku built out of smaller sudokus, where the whole had to cohere even as each piece kept its own internal logic. Beneath that design lies a borrowed scaffolding, a structure used at first for purely architectural reasons and then, once the music had taken its shape, allowed to fall away. The frame is gone; the music stands without it. Whatever a listener finds in it is, by her own insistence, no less true than what she found while making it.
That borrowed scaffolding was the Hero’s Journey, and over time it bled past mere structure into the music’s character and into the making itself, there were stretches where Herlop found herself scoring the very ordeal she happened to be living, the process quietly rhyming with its own form, faintly meta, faintly ironic.
Certainly experimental with acoustic and electronic elements including a trip to Bali to record the gamelan parts played by local musicians, Dja Dja is a genre-defying feast for the mind, body, and soul. With music this rich, wild, and free I recommend strapping on a seatbelt to keep you grounded but in this case it won’t help.