The album begins by cracking open a time capsule: An eerie melody sung by what feels like an previous girl strains by way of vinyl distortion, as if arriving from a fantastic distance. In a manner, it has: The track, “Deixem lo dol” (which suggests one thing like “allow us to not mourn”) is a relic of native Holy Week traditions; the archival recording was made years in the past by a girl in Saint Augustine, Florida, the place a contingent of Menorcans arrived within the late 1700s. Instantly it turns into clear that Ferrer desires to carry this music ahead in time: As she braids her personal voice with the spooky crackle of the recording, she is accompanied by a plucky synth arpeggio. The result’s half Alan Lomax, half Wendy Carlos.
A cautious mix of simplicity and pathos offers the album its energy. In “Malanat,” drawn from two subject songs she turned up in her archival analysis, Ferrer sings of aching backs and crops going to seed, tracing an ancient-sounding melody over a subdued organ drone. If it feels like a track of mourning, that’s as a result of it’s: She has described the track as an homage to the island’s rural traditions, traditions which can be quickly disappearing—fields as soon as shimmering with wheat have grow to be plots for summer season houses and swimming swimming pools.
Ferrer is a part of a wave of Spanish musicians intent on interrogating regional people traditions, together with artists like de Elche, Tarta Relena, Maria Arnal i Marcel Bages, and even Rosalía, who acquired her begin as a maverick flamenco singer. For Ferrer, meaning responding to the fact of the current second. One of some authentic compositions on the album, though set to a standard melody, “Glosa a Menorca” sounds virtually like ambient people, with fingerpicked guitarrón dissolving into an ethereal mist. Ferrer’s lyrics, nevertheless, are pointed: She sings of dying fish, drying aquifers, and younger individuals pressured out by a rapacious actual property market. It’s a track of fierce—and fiercely protecting—love.
Her ardour additionally comes by way of within the wildness of the album’s highlights, which sound as gnarled and weatherbeaten as Menorca’s native ullastre, a species of untamed olive tree. In “Voldria lo que voldria,” she intones a darkly hypnotic melody over a ritualistic drumbeat, whereas yelps and ululations enfold her—a snapshot, maybe, of the anarchic ecstasy that characterizes the annual celebrations of the island’s small cities. The closing “M’agrada s’espigolar” takes that livewire power and turns it ethereal. That is one other subject track; it consists of a single repeated stanza: “M’agrada s’espigolar/I es nar replegant espigues/Per tenir un tros de pa/Per menjar amb un plat de figues” (“I like to go reaping/And gathering wheat/To have a chunk of bread/To eat with a plate of figs”). The chorus is sung first by Pilar Pons, a celebrated native folksinger; then, with each loop, Ferrer provides one other multitracked concord. Regularly, what begins as a track about cyclical patterns and easy pleasures builds right into a refrain of dizzying harmonic complexity. It feels charged with virtually supernatural pressure, like a corridor of mirrors reflecting again on the untold generations and numerous harvests that gave the track its timeless form.