Congost CD (handmade)

Congost is Lucrecia Dalt's first full length release, all made at her former home in Barcelona basically with a laptop and three microphones putting together the sound of guitars, basses, voices, floor tom, tambourine, cello, trumpet, xylophone, wooden instruments, jars, bottles, sponges, plastic bags, claps, dance-step percussions, knocking-on-the-table percussions, bang-on-the-wall percussions, bicycles, ambient recordings and sampled drums in a collection of 14 songs all recorded and performed by herself except Ara and Sobrevolar which features Luke Sutherland from Long Fin Killie and Music AM on the bass, Matias Rossi from Bradien on the guitar for shoi, Paul Daniels also from Bradien & St.Andrius on the trumpet for Car song, and Marina Jover from Las Burnin’ Ladillas on the cello for shoi.
You can find different atmospheres and moods on the record, though the constant could be that Lucrecia wanted from the beginning that the sound on the whole record to be almost hi cut, but having a varied palette of tempos, number of layers and voice personalities, for instance you can find really basic songs like Medellín made with two guitar lines, clean voice, and looped voices at the end, or Carbón, a statement made with a clumsy bass, and more layered complex constructions like Safe side, Ceniza or Por ahí where you can swim and find different sounds and textures each time you listen to them. She also wanted to approach different rhythms: in Ara and Sobrevolar you can find an R&B touch in the drums, in Car Song you can feel there’s a bolero lost somewhere, or a some kind of Soul at the beginning of extraña colección. And there are also catchy rhythms like on too much light and shoi mainly made with a floor tom.

On this record she took time to put all the sounds together carefully, and as it is a homemade record she managed to take advantage of the space to experiment with sound, so you can hear natural reverbs on her voice and guitars from her corridor, percussions and textures made with bangs on the walls or by rubbing the microphone on cloths, chairs, plastics, sponges and even recording voices with drum microphones, getting special textured sounds without processing them, all this so that each song could get its own personality.