Dja Dja

Marina Herlop’s Dja Dja opens like a held breath finally released: a violent celebration of life, though not the hedonist’s easy yes. The exultation here is hard-won, arrived at rather than assumed, an armation drawn up from reflection and a long inward descent, stripped of every navet|. What animates it is a kind of undirected anger, rage reimagined as a creative force that spends itself in catharsis, and a gratitude so overwhelming it can no longer be contained by the body. This is a music of struggle, but the struggle is not for conquest or ruin; it is for self-armation, for the quiet authority of someone defending her principles without ever needing to name them. Conceived as a single, unbroken body of work in which every track answers to the others, Dja Dja is the most architecturally ambitious thing Herlop has made, a giant sudoku built out of smaller sudokus, where the whole had to cohere even as each piece kept its own internal logic. Beneath that design lies a borrowed scaolding, a structure used at first for purely architectural reasons and then, once the music had taken its shape, allowed to fall away. The frame is gone; the music stands without it. Whatever a listener finds in it is, by her own insistence, no less true than what she found while making it. That borrowed scaolding was the Hero’s Journey, and over time it bled past mere structure into the music’s character and into the making itself, there were stretches where Herlop found herself scoring the very ordeal she happened to be living, the process quietly rhyming with its own form, faintly meta, faintly ironic. Across these movements the Catalan composer-classically trained, equally at home in the avant-garde-sets herself a double standard she refused to relax: more open and intelligible than her earlier records, yet venturing onto ground she had never walked before. Voice and bass, so central to her past work, are held deliberately in reserve, withheld until their arrival some ten minutes in lands with real force. For the first time she lets orchestral brass into her palette, scored not by formal training but by intuition, feeling her way toward timbres that conjure whole worlds without ever tipping into excess. Almost everything was made by hand, at home, in a process that could take exactly as long as the music demanded. For months a vast cardboard diagram lay on her studio floor, mapping harmony, instrumentation, tempo and meter until its private rules acquired the force of law; the gamelan was recorded in Bali with local musicians; a trusted friend served as score doctor through the long work of harmony, structure and mix. Throughout, Herlop describes subordinating herself to the music rather than commanding it, following its instructions for as long as it needed her. It is fitting, then, that Dja Dja is her first self-released album, a record made with this much autonomy seemed to ask for it, and the slow pace of its making left no room for a label’s calendar. The release is austere by design, almost without imagery. Herlop has little appetite for the visual; she prefers a music that is blind and self-sucient, and in an age of visual surplus she would rather hand the picture back to the listener. The only story she asks anyone to follow is the one the music tells itself.