Debit

Debit

Desaceleradas

Modern Love

Debit returns to Modern Love with her second album for the label, a chopped & screwed love-letter to the sounds of rebajada - half speed cumbia pioneered by Sonido Dueñez - sounding like some incredible crossover between DJ screw and The Caretaker doing vaporwave in Colombia's Caribbean coast. Spend any amount of time pacing the streets of Monterrey, the bustling city in the north of Mexico where Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, grew up, and you'll be sure to catch traces of cumbia echoing from Bluetooth speakers, DIY soundsystems or car stereos. An Afro-Latin dance form and "practica cultural" originating in Colombia in the early 19th century, cumbia evolved rapidly in the early 1900s, as a localised sound played on drums and flutes quickly modernised to integrate European instrumentation like the accordion. When it reached Mexico in the 1940s, the sound shifted again, fusing with mariachi styles and integrating further vallenato folk elements. Eventually, cumbia spread across the entirety of Latin America, splintering into a spectrum of different musical styles such as chicha in Peru and cumbia villera in Argentina. And over in Monterrey, cumbia inadvertently found its own idiosyncratic groove. In the 1950s until the 1970s, waves of immigrants from across Mexico and Latin America headed to Monterrey to find work, making a home in Colonia Independencia. And Colombian cumbia records, shipped in from Mexico City, Houston and Miami, became the soundtrack of the neighborhood, relaying familiar stories to a rural working class adjusting to their new industrial reality. The...

Debit

The Long Count

Modern Love

Delia Beatriz’s musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017’s acclaimed “Animus”, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released 'System' harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. On 'The Long Count', the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It’s audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane. 'The Long Count' is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments - whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets - using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico’s pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that’s not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it’s impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it’s feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance. Featuring soundscapes that are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, the material here is as intentional, direct...