Tag: electronic

Maria Usbeck’s rejuvenating Envejeciendo

We’re back (yes I’ve officially started talking in the 1st person plural about myself now) with another addition to the blog. This time I will be talking about “Look at the title you dipshit”. On the surface this album doesn’t provide anything new or innovative; another bilingual female electro-pop singer using multiple languages in quite repetitive and short-lived chorus lines. In fact I don’t understand Spanish but I am 50% certain that half of her texts are just translations from Spanish to English or vice-versa however which way you want to spin it. Yet it speaks of her open-mindedness, and the beauty of getting to know the unknown.

Front cover of ‘Envejeciendo’ with Marie Usbeck herself musing in front of her reflection echoed in the water.

However the album’s seeming simplicity is made up for in mellifluous rhythms and arrangements – which expeditiously invite you to enter a world out of time and space. I recently read about a neuroscientific study that claimed that good, enjoyable music is registered in the brain when it is either very predictable and confirming previous patterns in the brain, or when it topples and surprises the brain in its harmony by that one tone off, I would claim Usbeck manages to do both with it’s free floating synth streams, and tentative drum pattern surges which can nonetheless create watershed moments of exuberance and accord because of the text.

She’s so cute; here holding a plant

The album titel is literally translated as ‘getting, or growing old’; it’s first track’s Adios A Mi Memoria is so reminiscent for an earlier period in my life that it almost hurts: musing “Every day is a new day, cause’ I can’t remember what I did yesterday” – undoubtedly speaking to a lot of youth and Millenials contemporary hedonistic ways of life. Calling into question what it means when every day is a day on itself, and the limits of the human mind in recalling past days.
The next song ‘Un Cabello Gris’ has a similarly touching vocal ‘I see something in your hair, — is it something new? is it something that you knew that grew? They say wisdom grows with every silver, falling from your head, falling everywhere’ it’s frolicking and lingering baseline is the perfect guidance for a less trivial philosophical account of how we grow old, but also how ideas are formed and justified by us humans – when do we make decisions about our social relations and how? Do these ideas just spring out of the blue or do they slowly grow to ripe, like a silver strain of hair, a strain of life, like the Greek Moirae (Fates) three hag-like sisters that manage and cut the lifelines of people. By now it should be clear I could write 10 pages on this less than 30 mins long album that manages to touch on a lot of crucial values to me. Paradoxically enough this whimsical album about growing older seems to have elongated my life.

20 Yoga Memes That Are Honestly Funny - Love Brainy Quote

So I will cut it off with reference to one sample that invites you to take a moment in time to mind your breath in a shamanistic and ritualistic fashion. I myself consider myself not to be very spiritual, nor yoga-minded but it was amazing how this Usbeck reached out to me from the other side of the world and I was seemingly in the disposition to perform the soft instructions of ‘Retirement Home’, providing me with a moment of reprieve and grace in the slipstream of the current world.
Attention to your body almost invariably equals a little bit a of time for yourself! Take care all!


Thanks Marie, I will definitely follow up on you :-).

Jackie Mendoza’s “LuvHz”

This album caught my attention after I’d gotten it on my phone but hadn’t listened to it consciously yet. Generally I listen to the bulk of my music on ‘shuffle’ & ‘all songs’ for a twofold reason:

1. I know that music often gets you when you are in a ‘vulnerable’ or susceptible state. aka. an emotional one. In my experience when I am in an already emotional state it doesn’t really matter what I hear as long as the general narrative of the story correlates with how I am feeling at that moment in time. i.e. When I’m sad; sad songs will automatically speak to me.

2. Putting my whole music library on shuffle then diversifies and maximizes all the possibilities in genre and style that I will relate to in this susceptible state.

However this still means a song has to catch my attention, it might be sad when I’m sad but if there is no catchy hook, no good chorus or off-killter rhythm then my attention will not be sparked and songs will softly ooze one into the next, like susurrant displacements of soundspan and attentionwaves.

This is exactly how Jackie Mendoza’s new album LuvHz jabbed and hit me with it’s poppy and pumping fifth track “Your Attention”. I was dreaming away when I heard a faint murmuring in my ears “Aaaaattentioooooooon”. The kick immediately forces you to oblige and listen to the dreamy arrangement that Ms. Mendoza has prepped for us. Even though she only serves us with a limited number of rounds (it’s a relatively short song and the alternating and pounding kick that we only get to hear twice, guides you through it with the capriciousness of an autumn shower). The sounds are quite short and broadly selected from so many different genres. It’s only at the end of the song that your realize that you were completely lost in the preceding moments.

Fast forward into the 5th track ‘Puppet Angels’ and you know where it’s at. More industrial and classic kick arrangements are combined with loud thundering and ominous synths and rhythmic and punchy vocals. All the while staying true to a dreamy, wistful and frisky combination of sounds.

Similar to contemporary female artists like Marie Davidson, Olivia Neutron-John and Kedr Livanskiy (I am so sorry for calling upon a female canon – it’s just the vocals), Mendoza is a young female artist that, in my opinion stands out because she is not afraid to cross-genres and soundscapes, even within songs and arrangements themselves. And she is similar in the fact that, well, she is young beautiful and daring :-). The arrangements she brings are closer to her latin roots and therefor closer to folk and indietronica.