Marina Herlop ?????
Place and date: Apollo 2 (IV/3/2024)
The singer, pianist and composer Marina Herlop presented her latest album Nekkuja as a culmination of the events held at Apolo within the Barcelona Piano Day. She arrived crowned with outstanding success, after receiving excellent reviews in specialized media such as Pitchfork or The Wire, which led her to undertake an extensive international tour, linked to her previous album, the equally renowned Pripyat. According to what she said, there have been one hundred and fifty concerts, including stops at the American Primavera Sound events.
On this occasion she performed alone, something that at first might seem like a handicap if we take into account that in her previous performance in the city, at the Teatre Grec, during La Mercè, she was supported by the duo Tarta Relena and a percussionist. However, with the help of pre-recorded voices and sounds, she came out of the challenge very gracefully, demonstrating that she is enough and more than enough to create a proposal in which avant-garde and classicism go hand in hand.
A mix of electronic, pop and experimental music, it includes samples of children’s laughter, bird chirps, moving water or ethnic percussions; Alternating invented languages ??and the increasingly prominent use of Catalan, the concert opens with Busa and a kind of haiku that repeats “Damunt de tu, només les flors”, a poem that serves to pay tribute to Frederic Mompou. Later, already seated at the piano, she sings “A les mans, hi tinc un tros de llum,” alternating high-pitched, heavenly warbles with crystalline, minimalist pianism in a song, Cosset, that sounds somewhere between shamanic and bucolic.
Marina Herlop is rightly compared to Björk, but in her music you can also trace influences from Laurie Anderson and even Meredith Monk, in a dreamlike and at times spectral sound that makes her an extremely unique artist, who knows how to be solemn and at the same time practice the most experimental abstraction, whether resorting to Hindu singing or stark breakbeats.
