SHOW REVIEW LUCRECIA DALT AT MISSISSIPPI STUDIOS

BY ROBERT HAM

What do you suppose the death rattle of the entire technological grid would sound like? Or, say, an attempt by a faulty AI program to write a suite of future pop tunes? My guess is that it would be something close to the music of Lucrecia Dalt.

The Colombian-born artist creates random sonic elements that never quite connect properly. There’s an audible friction and scrape and dissonance that emerges as these fragments of melody and drone bump together to generate the sparks within Dalt’s experimental electronic compositions.

The hands and mind responsible for these songs are all too human. Throughout Dalt’s performance last week at Mississippi Studios, she appeared humbled and almost shy about being so far from her home base of Berlin only to find a few hundred people in front of her, happily riding each choppy wave of the music.

She also seemed surprised by what was happening just to her left onstage. To be fair, Dalt’s accompanist Alex Lázaro made himself hard to ignore. His percussion array was arranged like a modern art sculpture with the pieces jutting out at unusual angles or placed in untraditional ways. And he played with huge, sweeping movements of his arms, landing the right amount of force on the drums as needed to either ground or further upend the music.

His rhythms read as Latin, but with a random assortment of typical beats removed from each measure. Propulsive enough to keep the music rolling forward, but not steady enough to move one’s hips to. “We have some energy tonight,” Dalt commented early in the set, referring to Lazaro. “I wish I could compensate.” She didn’t need to. They were perfectly symbiotic, maintaining a delicate creative balance that stayed true even as their music constantly threatened to topple.