Global Music Column – February

Debit – The Long Count

There is an uncanniness in listening to a musical instrument you have never heard being played for the first time. As your brain makes sense of a new sound, it tries to frame it within the realm of familiarity, producing a tussle between the known and unknown.

The second album from Mexican-American producer Delia Beatriz, AKA Debit, embraces this dissonance. Taking the flutes of the ancient Mayan courts as her raw material and inspiration, Beatriz used archival recordings from the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to create a digital library of their sounds. She then processed these ancient samples through a machine-learning program to create woozy, ambient soundscapes.

Read the review in the Guardian.

[This piece was published on 28/01/22]