Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Lucy enters Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and Dorothy gets whisked away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. Literary theorist Joseph Campbell would define each of those moments as a “call to adventure,” the first step of the hero’s journey that underlies all storytelling. Now we can add one more such odyssey to the list: Marina Herlop follows her muse into the world of Dja Dja.
After two relatively unadorned albums of piano and voice, Herlop made her name with the expansive Pripyat and the daring Nekkuja. For her follow-up to the pair, she wanted to put restrictions on her creative process—an effort, given her seemingly boundless energy, akin to keeping a runaway train on the rails. Herlop meticulously planned Dja Dja as one continuous composition; on a piece of cardboard laid across the floor of her home studio, she mapped out each section according to Campbell’s schema. After the call to adventure, the hero crosses the threshold into the unknown and meets a series of challenges until, with the help of a mentor, they overcome a great trial. Upon success, they return home forever altered. The recording process itself turned into a hero’s journey for Herlop: She labored on it for three years, surmounting the seemingly insurmountable ordeal with the help of her collaborator Adri Goor. The effort paid off: Spilling over Herlop’s self-imposed boundaries, Dja Dja is her most ambitious album yet, at once weirder, wilder, and more thoughtful than her previous work.
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Pripyat and Nekkuja were already wide-reaching in their moods and palettes, but here she harnesses an even broader array of sounds and ideas, pulling in chamber ensembles, alien funk, and holodecks full of trilling birds. The playful flutes of album opener “Flor de los Precipios” telegraph a peaceful realm; the only sign that something might be amiss comes with the pensive piano that introduces “Heladas.” The journey proper begins with “As Meigas,” and Herlop clearly revels in the transition from the known into the unknown, dropping us into a world as disorienting as any in fiction. A twinkling melody floats like pixie dust and then the voices come, each more discomfiting than the last: mumbling, babbling, yodeling, chanting in a made-up language. Across six and a half minutes, these voices seem not only to respond to one another but even to make a certain kind of sense. What’s true of the song is true of the album: Herlop is at her strongest when she’s at her strangest, as her pop sensibilities make even the most confounding choices legible.
