Mexican-American producer Delia Beatriz, AKA Debit, has a talent for making historical sounds her own. Her 2022 breakthrough, The Long Count, featured woozy, ambient soundscapes made from electronically processed samples of ancient Maya flutes. On her latest record, Desaceleradas (Decelerated), Beatriz turns her attention to the 90s trend of cumbia rebajada. Slowing the Afro-Latin dance genre of cumbia to a sludgy tempo, cumbia rebajada is a dub-influenced take on a typically upbeat, party-driven sound. DJ Gabriel Dueñez popularised the style with his bootleg cassettes; two of his earliest releases now form the basis of Beatriz’s experiments.
Landing somewhere between composer William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops and DJ Screw’s chopped’n’screwed production style, Desaceleradas slows the shaker-rattling, synth syncopations of cumbia rebajada into unrecognisable ambient territory. La Ronda y el Sonidero and Vinilos Trasnacionales contain hints of the signature cumbia shuffle and twanging synth melody, but Beatriz’s added tape hiss, reverb and melodic warping transform the style into an eerie, ethereal soundworld of nightmare fairground music and yearning drones.
Much more than just an academic exercise of slowing material down to its lowest possible bpm, Beatriz’s arrangements force us to focus on the innate strangeness of the present moment. On Bootlegs, a single synth tone becomes drawn-out, harsh industrial distortion. Cholombia, MTY highlights the atonal dissonance produced between the notes of a slow motion melody and Los Balleza rings out with cacophonous reverb.
Beatriz’s granular dissection of sounds means they’re constantly shifting, creating a sensation equivalent to sea sickness. This uneasy quality is the opposite of background meditative ambience. Instead, on Desaceleradas Beatriz performs a remarkable feat, showing how slowness and subtlety can contain just as much dread and discomfort as the chaos of noise.
Also out this month
Peruvian producer Alejandra Cárdenas, AKA Ale Hop, releases her debut album under her own name, A Body Like a Home (Other People). Featuring frank spoken word poetry about growing up under Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, Cárdenas creates an impressionistic 13 tracks of autobiographical mood music. Amsterdam-based sextet Nusantara Beat transform the Indonesian traditional style of keroncong into shimmering psychedelia on their self-titled debut (Glitterbeat). Highlights include the synth funk of Ular Ular and earworming dual guitar and vocal melodies of Kalangkang. Percussionist and producer Sarathy Korwar’s latest album, There Is Beauty, There Already (Otherland) is a lively love letter to rhythm. Playing as a 40-minute suite of continuous drumming, Korwar draws us into a trance-inducing state of repetition, referencing everything from free jazz to konnakol phrasing.
