An hour of ancient and alien sounds from the Catalan composer and PAN favourite. Marina Herlop is at once from the future and from the past. The classically trained Catalan singer’s voice opens a door onto an older world—a nymph out of a Romantic painting. Underneath, something deeply alien. “When you’re writing a song… there’s a moment of expulsion, like a squid spitting,” she told Pitchfork. She didn’t open a laptop until her third album, learning Ableton from scratch over a fortnight in her father’s family home in the Aragon hills. That record, Pripyat, and its follow-up Nekkuja landed on PAN, placing her among the experimental queens like Eartheater and Jenny Hval—with a touch of Björk. Her RA Mix brings those influences to the surface: classical with a whiff of the strange (Holst’s Rig Veda hymns, Sakamoto playing Ravel), music for worlds that don’t exist (Ragnarok Online, Jujutsu Kaisen, Morricone) and a study in everything a voice can be made into. Barely any is club music. Assembled in Ableton—”I don’t have access to a CDJ right now,” she says—RA.1057 is a soundtrack for decompression. Asked which club shaped her most, she named one that isn’t: El Pumarejo, the Barcelona space where she met the musicians still in her band. Find the Q&A and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/1076 @marinaherlopofficial
