Hüma Utku’s Dracones begins by finding its listeners in deep house, or maybe deep waters: we’re floating, drifting, surrounded by otherworldly drones and echoes. We hear cosmic resonances–alien life or whalesong?–that morph from hums to howls to cries and again over layers of vibrational haze. Voices are distorted, cello strings groan, and an electromagnetic lyre (Mihalis Shammas’s lyraei) shrieks. The life that rises from this futurist strangeness is pure and primeval.
“A World Between Worlds” explores unknowns inside as a lot as with out. It units a definite tone for Utku’s experiments throughout the album: they’re poignant of their abstractness, and the methods she works along with her numerous implements and manufacturing results enable her to precise in any other case inarticulable feelings.
Informing Utku’s sound artwork on Dracones is, at the beginning, her expertise going by being pregnant. Sonic manifestations of this abound. Laced by a number of tracks are the sounds of ultrasound imaging, the uncooked rush of a fetal heartbeat invigorating the album beginning at its midway mark on “Right here Be Dragons”.
It pulses by a mattress of commercial static; in its wake comes Utku’s spectral voice and straining cello. It’s not straightforward to make out all of the phrases she rasps, although some stand out: the previous, a physique, assume, really feel, “are you ready?” She is perhaps whispering them to herself as an expectant mom or to the being rising in her womb; maybe that little one is echoing them, in some way, again to her. These are compositions that don’t really feel certain by linear directionality.
That’s true all through. Tracks on Dracones usually appear to start in medias res, aural blasts already in progress. Utku tends towards cycles, zigzags, and amorphous mists as her foundational shapes. These, too, are a part of the affective constellation surrounding Utku’s journey to motherhood. They’re sounds of tension and unknowing (the modulations that construction “Consolation of the Shadows” burn white-hot), of the troubles she has of repeating errors of the previous (“A Familial Curse” lasts over 11 minutes and options digital wails and pushed beats), of the weighty tasks of making life (as within the heavy low finish of “Care in Eat”).
Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a strong decision within the closing observe “Ayaz’a”. As a substitute, there’s a comfortable acceptance of chaos, a gradient of gentler cries in string and synth kind. Love and worry are inextricable in person-to-person care, and Utku strikes ahead burdened with this information and blessed by the chance.
Title Dracones comes from the Latin phrase hic sunt dracones, a reference to the legendary beasts drawn on outdated maps to symbolize the unknown and its potential for hazard. The terrain connecting thoughts, coronary heart, womb, and world is difficult to chart, irrespective of what number of instances it’s traveled in numerous instances and areas.
Hüma Utku has performed one thing exceptional in tracing her personal such journey on Dracones. It’s revolutionary for the unpredictability of its sounds and the honesty with which she mediates such a deeply felt interval of her life. It’s not for the incurious. Dracones embraces the shadows and the dissonance and is gripping for it.
