Lucrecia Dalt: “I’m not fearing genre. I’m not fearing a lot”

After a health scare forced Lucrecia Dalt to reassess her usually high-velocity life, the experimental composer – working alongside her partner David Sylvian – discovered both obsession and creative liberation in the stillness.

For nearly two decades, Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt has moved through her life at a ravenous clip. A self-described “vampire for velocity”, the prolific experimental songwriter has maintained an unyielding schedule of touring, writing, recording and releasing undulating strains of avant-garde electronic music – often in rapid succession. In recent years, between zipping around the world for gigs and laying down tracks, she has carved out time to compose scores for television shows and films like A24’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. But in 2023, Dalt abruptly found herself staring down a serious health scare – a moment that saw her innately energetic way of being sputter to a halt.

While grappling with the terror of two seizures, which happened after she returned home to Berlin following a few dates in Italy, Dalt had no choice but to decelerate from living at such a merciless pace. “Looking back, it’s like, ‘Wow, it was laid out for a lot of things going wrong,’” she explains. “Because everything was so tight, in terms of deadlines and touring and composing.” A little while after that, Dalt decamped from her longtime adopted home of Berlin to the arid environs of New Mexico – at once to be closer to her partner, the musician David Sylvian, and to keep her foot off the gas pedal for a while.

After settling into her new desert home studio, Dalt embarked on a “self-imposed sabbatical” to write new music. She used the time to focus on details she’d long been entranced by but was usually far too swamped to marinate in, such as delving into polyrhythms and beautiful melodies tinged with the bizarre. “I like to experience the sensation of just getting absolutely obsessed by a theme, a subject, and work from there,” she explains. “So it really opened up a possibility for me that I guess I hadn’t been able to even realise before, because of the speed of just being in the flow of too much.”

That deliberate, unhurried process gave way to Dalt’s transformational new album, A Danger to Ourselves, out now on RVNG Intl. Unlike her lauded 2022 album ¡Ay!, which filtered the memory of traditional boleros she’d heard as a child through an extraterrestrial vantage point, Dalt didn’t operate with a specific genre in mind this time around. Her new songs span trembling ballads, spectral R&B and quaking electronica, among other sounds, never lingering too long in one place before alchemising yet again. “I look forward to composing in totally different ways after this album,” she says. “I feel like it’s the beginning of a new space, or something like that, in which I’m more honest with my voice, more honest with my compositions. I’m not fearing genre. I’m not fearing a lot.” 

Her approach to making A Danger to Ourselves reconfigured Dalt’s music-making senses entirely. It allowed Dalt to further lean on her own intuition, giving diffuse-seeming ideas, themes and images a sense of coherence. (Some items on the album’s mood board: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the atomic bomb subplot from Twin Peaks: The Return, Benjamín Labatut’s novel The MANIAC, and the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta.) Some songs, like Cosa Rara, began as a riff on a loop created by her frequent musical cohort, the Spanish percussionist Alex Lazaro. Others emerged in more mystical ways: the sumptuous Stelliformia, a disconcerting torch song punctuated by creaks, echoes and thrums, came from Dalt “surrendering to the sensation”, as she describes it. “I live artistically for the coincidence, for it to happen,” she says. “And when it happens, it’s like, ah! It’s such a pleasure… You could be working on a layer of drums, your voice starts to perform, and then the little tweaking here coincides with the moment the bass does the change.” Those “little coincidental gestures” guided the songwriting, showing her where to go next on this uncharted path.

Yet the seeds of A Danger to Ourselves go back even further, to when Dalt and Sylvian – an experimental singer-songwriter, once of the band Japan – first connected. As an admirer of his work, Dalt reached out to Sylvian online about four years ago. The two started talking and developed a mutual rapport. “Eventually, it became an invitation, and then eventually it became much more,” she smiles, speaking from her studio one late afternoon in August. The pair began dating long distance, while Dalt was still living in Berlin. Yet the early days of their relationship stirred something within her. Floored by experiencing “a way of communicating that was very direct and sensual”, she says, the eroticism of their new relationship inspired her to begin writing poetry. 

These verses eventually became the lyrical backbone of the album. They emerge in the shadowy, psychedelic clangs of Divina, where Dalt pledges her devotion to someone she considers her mirror image: “You are the only one I can fool death with,” she croons early in the song. Originally called Ketamine Tears, Dalt drew from Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orpheus to probe the idea of subsuming one’s loved one. Specifically, she wrote the song imagining how “if you lick the tears of your lover, you can basically have a trip – or the idea that you can possess the lover by swallowing them.” It resounds, too, in the brief and sparsely arranged Amorcito Caradura, in which Dalt unfurls a crackling ode to her love in her native Spanish: “Amorcito de mi vida/ que te quiero que te quiero/ Porque me despistas tanto/ Si de amor me muero,” she sings. (“My dearest love/ that I love you, that I love you/ Why do you throw me off so much/ if of love I die?”)

Sylvian co-produced the album, played guitar on several tracks, and lent his baritone gasp to the album’s unsettling single Cosa Rara. He also became a mentor to Dalt, particularly when she was putting the finishing touches on the album; his “profoundly analytical” ideas helped her crystallise the sonic juxtapositions she sought to convey on A Danger to Ourselves. On it, she wanted “to work with minimalism and maximalism rhythmically, but melodically, I wanted to be almost super naked”, with her voice more central than it has ever been on her previous albums.

Dalt’s wide-ranging ear for creating an otherworldly milieu has also made her a sought-after figure in the world of film and television – a new artistic dimension she began exploring during the pandemic. As the most outsized influence on her work, Dalt views film as “opportunities to explore sides of you that you haven’t experienced”. Taking on these projects was something of a learning curve, especially at the beginning. But just as she found the enforced slowdown after her first health scare creatively liberating, Dalt discovered a similar freedom in the structured demands of scoring film and television. “Because you have to work faster, you have to be very effective,” she explains. “And so, I think it’s a more technical layout that helps me just be more creative.”

Dalt, who scored the recently released folk-horror Rabbit Trap – a film that involves collecting audio samples as a pivotal plot point – has also relished being challenged by directors’ visions while staying true to her own sensibilities. “I hope I’m going to be trusted by directors in a creative way, and I try to take projects that allow me to do that,” Dalt says, “because I don’t like scores that manipulate or tell you how to feel. I like contrast. I like to create a unique sound for them.” These projects have taken her in unexpected musical directions; Rabbit Trap, which is set in the 1970s, required Dalt to compose using synthesisers she’d never used before.

Earlier this summer, Dalt encountered another challenge: she experienced a seizure, and her heart stopped for eight seconds. In a preternatural turn, it happened to be the same day she and her friend, the composer and singer Camille Mandoki, released their track Caes together. Dalt doesn’t often broadcast the intimacies of her personal life online, but she felt compelled to acknowledge the unusual connection between these two disparate events. In an uncharacteristic turn, she shared her thoughts on an Instagram post about the song’s release coming immediately after her seizure: “It’s kind of wild because it’s a protest song about liberation, suggesting that the sublime can be reached through surrendering to the act of falling,” she wrote. Then, she extended a hand outward: “I’m curious – are there others in this community dealing with epilepsy?” she added in the same caption. “I’d love to know how you deal with it as a creative and performer! I only learned yesterday that Neil Young deals with it.” 

This health scare – the second she’s dealt with in just a few years – has prompted Dalt to continue reevaluating her relationship with stillness and what it means in her life. “Who knows what happens next,” she wrote in the aftermath of her seizure. “For now, everything smells so brilliantly vibrant and different, taking it easy as everything regains coherence.” Dalt doesn’t view grappling with her health as a stultifying prospect, nor has it dimmed her curiosity about trying new things. Instead, she sees these swerves as a mechanism – a way to become even more curious and seek unlikely connections, both in her film scoring work and the music-making that’s meaningful to her. “I feel so connected to that way of working in which you allow time,” she says. “You get absolutely obsessed and possessed by the work, and then things start to come out from that. And if I can continue having the chance of doing this, I would give into it forever.”