Debit – The Long Count (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 34:43 minutes | 299 MB | Genre: Experimental Electronic, Psychedelic
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Modern Love
Modern Love debut from Delia Beatriz aka Debit; a study of Mayan wind instruments from the late post classical period, rebuilt as synth instruments and deployed with ultimate heft and wooooze.
Delia Beatriz’s musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017’s acclaimed “Animus”, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released ‘System’ harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. On ‘The Long Count’, the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It’s audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane.
‘The Long Count’ is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments – whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets – using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico’s pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music.
Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that’s not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it’s impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it’s feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance.
Featuring soundscapes that are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, the material here is as intentional, direct and meticulously crafted as the work of Deathprod or Thomas Köner; Debit’s microtonal compositions are psychedelic to their core, shapeshifting through dimensions and painting complex mental images while retaining a stylistic focus and lucidity that’s all too rare. Although ‘The Long Count’ was nurtured by machines, human experience is coded into its DNA – an ancient-future heirloom that whispers through countless generations.
Tracklist:
1-01. Debit – 1st Day (02:21)
1-02. Debit – 1st Night (03:28)
1-03. Debit – 5th Night (03:04)
1-04. Debit – 3rd Night (02:50)
1-05. Debit – 2nd Day (02:08)
1-06. Debit – 5th Day (08:10)
1-07. Debit – 6th Night (03:43)
1-08. Debit – 4th Night (03:12)
1-09. Debit – 7th Day (04:22)
1-10. Debit – 7th Night (01:23)
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