Vincent Moon, who won the Sound & Vision Prize in 2009 with his masterpiece ‘La Faute des Fleurs’, is back with what he calls his best film ever. We are not reluctant to agree with him. ‘Esperando el tsunami’ is an intoxicating picture & sound piece disguised as a road movie. Alejandra and Luis, the two young musicians in the South American duo Lulacruza, travel across Colombia to take the country’s musical nectar and transform it into their almost shamanic trance sessions, which call to mind Animal Collective’s early days. On the heels of them follows Moon with his sensuous-seeking camera and responsive musicianship -which make him into something quite unique in today’s film world. This hipster-vagabond who single-handedly revived the music video as an art form, is now doing the same with music documentary. But ‘Esperando El Tsunami’ is greater than its own genre, with its extreme close-ups of nature’s smallest details that open the film gradually up, as a magical-realism love story of the most beautiful kind. There is no doubt. Vincent Moon has done it again.

October 2011 – CPH DOX

Lulacruza, a Colombia and Argentina outfit composed of Alejandra Ortiz and Luis Maurette, add to a growing discography of two albums (2006’s Do Pretty! and 2008’s Soloina) and EP (2009’sCanta) with Circular Tejido, a half-hour set featuring four new pieces. As before, the material weaves Ortiz’s radiant vocalizing, South American instruments, electronics, field recordings, and percussion into a distinctive hybrid, but this time augments the duo’s South American folk palette (cuatro, charango, kalimba, rattles, etc.) with accordion, theremin, African drums, and woodwinds. As before, the group’s music proves to be both alluring and refreshing, a fresh breeze that’s welcome in our neck of the woods anytime.

“Rio Contento” immediately gets a major boost from the angelic vocalizing of Alejandra Ortiz, with her mutli-tracked voice gliding rapturously atop a lightly swinging backdrop of South American rhythms built up from acoustic and electronic elements. Lulacruza’s unique blend of traditional folk music and modern electronics comes especially to the forefront in “Simple Reflejo” when 4/4 dance rhythms animate the song’s rich blend of acoustic instruments and Ortiz’s crystal-clear vocals. Of the EP’s four tracks, it’s the one that’s most purely representative of the group’s sound as it features Ortiz and Maurette only, whereas the other three include guests’ woodwinds and percussion. Though it gradually swells in volume, the title track nevertheless opts for a comparatively more langurous style that cultivates a dream-like aura, an effect enhanced when the sonic palette grows ever-denser with the addition of theremin, synthesizer, woodwinds, and a larger array of voices. The EP’s closing track, “Montañita,” exudes joyousness in Ortiz’s vocal lines and wonderment in its hazy, electro-acoustic flow, with the clarinet musing of Ramiro Flores managing to make itself heard above the complex tapestry of sounds. That the recording was laid down in multiple locales, including Argentina and Oakland, USA, testifies to the music’s genre-defying andborder-collapsing nature.

April 2011

Tejido might be among the few properly post-apocalyptic lover’s rock albums, right after King Midas Sound’s Waiting For You and Tricky’s Maxinquaye. But whereas those records uncovered a glowing, cosmic erotics in the radioactive fallout of Jamaican dread accelerated under serious pressure, Tejido is the sound of what survives, persists, mutates and grows after everything has come crashing down from above the global south. In place of Soloina’s webs of electro-acoustic voice and percussion, Tejido is a bolder expression of synths, programmed beats, close harmonies, and forward production.

There is a dark undercurrent to the record, but it is less the darkness of immanent disaster and more an amplification of the sound of creation itself—like Lispector’s Agua Viva and Paz’s Water Night, Tejido walks a spiral to the center of a void to find a hidden river. Perhaps it’s no mistake that sensuality and post-millenial tension have proven such fertile ground for artists, a zone where the carnal and the cosmic are equal vectors for time-travel; the senses of destruction, eruption, and uncertain futures are as characteristic of the vulnerabilities of love as they are of our turbulent times. It is this mix of tentativeness and boldness in Tejido that suggests both the end and the beginning will require the courage to learn voices, gestures and colors anew.

- Brian Rogers

Keepin’ It Loopy

Bring the visualizers, fog machine and your Spanish dictionary for an evening filled with trippy beats and textured reverberations. Lulacruza is Latin-American electronica duo Alejandra Ortiz and Luis Maurette, from Bogotá and Buenos Aires, respectively. Their eclectic mix of Amazonian flutes, Colombian kalimba, cuatro and womping bass, keyboard, and samples taken from the jungles of South America is ayahuasca for the ears. The combination of indigenous instruments as well as indie and modren electronica sensibilities creates songs that sound as if a shaman, Manu Chao and your favorite dubstep DJ had an orgy.

www.sfreporter.com

Luis Maurette (Argentina) & songstress, Alejandra Ortiz (from Colombia) evoke the sound of a sampler plugging into a 100 year old tree in the rainforest with a mini-stereo mic catching the raindrops from leaves & mixed skillfully with the sultry vocal styling (quite sexy, might I add) of Alejandra as if she were a forest spirit playing in the mornings dew.

Peep the wonder from this sample mini-player right here & go download yourself a handful of esoteric loveliness right here.
DOWNLOAD CANTA.

Guaranteed to shake the hip & wriggle the soul, these 8 remixed tracks by a variety of finely handpicked artists bring a nice upbeat vibe & danceable form to this remix artist album.

blog.sohnup.com