The great Spain-based folktronic figure Bacanal Intruder has a new album out on Eglantine Records, and a free track, “Cantariola” (MP3), should be more than enough to get the uninitiated to check it out. Intruder is Luis Solis, who mixes scratchy samples, chamber arrangements of horns, strings and other instruments, plus sublimated vocals into an elegant cyborg pop. For every intoned vocal, there’s a blippy undercurrent; for every surface texture, there’s a plucked instrument. And that’s not counting the elements whose provenance (digital, analog, acoustic, virtual) remain impossible to pinpoint.
The combination is lovely, elegant, and intoxicating. The song is secretly brief. It has an almost suite-like format, the gentle opening (in which gossamer keys come to smother glitchy beats) and closing horn-like tones (suggesting nothing so much as Kid Koala covering David Byrne’s Knee Plays) framing the central vocal. The sections suggest a much lengthier listening experience than its actual 1:45. Making it all the more ready to be set on repeat.
More at the relasing label, eglantinerecords.com, and at Solis’s website, ambulatore.com/bacanalintruder.