by B. Levinson
There’s a CD out there in a flat cardboard sleeve that was put out by a label in Poland. I was handed a copy once by a member of noise jazz synth-drum duo LXMP at a show along their tour with Deerhoof. On that CD one can find some of the strangest and most exciting mutations upon rock, jazz, folk, and pop this side of the Tarantula Nebula. Skronks and clicks and bops and jams galore, I played this one out one summer and burned some music from Warsaw into my brain. This music, built up in a scene with little recent history of global musical export and thus, seemingly, little concern about burrowing into their own idiosyncrasies and esoteric isolation, found its way to the sunny pacific and into my hatchback and straight to my brain. Admittedly, it didn’t travel far from there.
I showed a few friends as I drove them around but it rarely seemed to stick (if solely because it was hard for us to commit the Polish artist names to our memory). Thus, my little storied past with this CD is mostly the story of two nodes, isolated and then bridged, then broken apart once again. One song, however, did have legs and it caught on with a few friends. That was Pictorial Candi’s “Ode To Plethora,” a windup toy adventure with mountains and valleys and glorious leaps within the vocal melody. This was my introduction to Pictorial Candi, noted for its boldness, bravery, and profound ambivalence. This was the image in my head of musicians working in the face of continental isolation. Recollection of these traits makes Secret Salts feel heavy.
Secret Salts drips with isolation, but of a different sort. Through cresting synths and bare drum sequences singer Candelaria Saenz Valiente embodies sadness as though falling apart, no yearning or desperation. Loneliness doesn’t even do it justice. Emptiness. Fragility. Stepping up to the plate regardless. Unwinding. Yes, this is dream pop, but only in the way that dreams take place: lopsided, malformed, and horrific even at their most alluring. It’s hardly hypnagogic nor hauntological, it’s direct and present. There’s a feeling of David Lynch here, not always the sirenly aroma of Julee Cruise (though some of that), but often the frailty and guileless self-pleasure of the lady in the radiator.
She sings of “the softest cosmos,” feeling “hot,” being “hot wheels,” pleasure “in a van,” everything jelly. On “Star Gel” she asks when “sensations become real places,” somewhere one can revisit. Or maybe she is begging it because these sensations are somewhere one has to revisit, day after day. It’s all shaky, unsteady. Catchy. It all locks in though. Star gel, suddenly glue, sparkling.
“Architecture In Berlin” makes me sea sick. Pistons fire and the thing takes off, frantically, only to retreat once again. These are the ups and downs, it’s cold then it’s warm. Valiente’s music is good to have, her crooning is etched in my head. Here it feels cosmic, a picture of the universe as the loneliest bedroom. Please join it, won’t you?