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  • Care of Editions

On her fifth full-length, Ou, experimental electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt explores uncertainty with a record whose title literally translates to "or" in Portuguese. Her inquisitive, abstract music draws emotional depth from daily banalities and plays with our basic concept of time.

Experimental electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt explores uncertainty. It's what she does best, with curiosity and a self-effacing confidence; it's no coincidence that the title of her fifth record literally translates to "or" in Portuguese. It’s an album of options, expectations, and the lingering hope that occurs when there’s a possibility of something better. Dalt repurposed her studio as a makeshift theater to screen films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Helke Sander, and other New German Cinema greats and Ou's cinematic feel is the direct result. "When I have input from outside, I start to see more surprises in what I’m making," she told Julia Holter in conversation for Electronic Beats. For her, movies act as personal creative partners, and the four-track LP and its subsections are a live unraveling of all the surprises that come from the process.

The first step is removing herself from the vocal spotlight. Opener "OVER UNITY" sees her whisper one indecipherable line, chop it up, and feed it through vocal effects to intensify each word. That’s the album’s only lyric. Meanwhile, a soft beep ticks like a metronome. She uses that constant element to contrast alternative forms of timekeeping in the piece, like the sputtering synths in the background. Dalt bypasses realism to pursue sounds rarely experienced in reality, a point she underlines on "OVER UNITY" when she reshapes the piece into a traditional song structure midway, drawing out asymmetrical melodies and an unconventional bassline.

As fascinated as it is with time, Ou is too ravenous to explore any single perception in depth. "IOT" breaks into three parts: "Roto," an anxious pulse of downbeats that closes with bashful clarinet; "Quebrado," a collection of broken telephone beeps and pitched-down gasps mimicking church bells; and "Suelto," a loose percussive arrangement accented with keys. The way Dalt sees it, time is an object passing through various forms of sound. Why waste it standing still when you can see it through a dozen lenses?

She does this by replicating Shepard tones throughout the album. Like the swirling stripes of a barber’s pole, these tones—a play on pitch where a note appears to move upward or downward—is an auditory illusion that plays with perceived direction. They’re superpositioned sine waves separated by octaves, swelling like that stale hum of an airplane lifting off or the rising and falling notes of THX’s infamous sound effect. The only piece exempt from this sound is also Ou’s darkest, "FLOTO," where ominous saxophone and wobbling bass recall the soundtracks of low-budget alien invasion flicks.

Like Laurie Anderson and those before her, Lucrecia Dalt is concerned not with upholding traditions, but reorganizing them—just like the label releasing the record, Care of Editions, which pays listeners to download its albums. On "ELEANORE," she combines wind chimes, cold percussive slaps, and descending string sections to draw emotional depth from daily banalities the same way the album’s artwork—sunlight leaking through a window shade like visual sine waves —does. Consider it disembodied pop where Dalt, a civil engineer who specialized in geotechnics, patiently reworks theories until they become scalable to the average listener. As a result, Ou sounds like a test of specific temporal concepts that is best observed from a distance. If you listen too close, its concept thins, and you lose your grip on the very abstract ideas Dalt is exploring.

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