Accio y Destino

FOREIGN BODY

Sharp strands of disintegrated string samples gradually pull together; celestial multi-tracked voices gather and thudding drums sketch out a spontaneous ritual routine; timeline and drone form a crawling impressionistic narrative. The first collaboration of Rupert Clervaux and Dania stretches across a single momentous 77-minute piece, combining languid drone with bursts of improvised vocals and percussion. The constituent pieces fuse together to form an exceptionally delicate epic that defies simple categorisation, combining the choreography of repetition and grids with ecstatic passages of their respective lead instruments.

Dania and Clervaux first worked together in 2015, when the former’s Barcelona-based Paralaxe Editions label released the latter’s ‘Two Changes’ duo LP with Beatrice Dillon. Clervaux later helped mix and master two of Dania’s releases – ’Voz’ and ‘Foreign Body’ – himself having moved to Spain, and by 2021 they were playing shared bills at shows, completing a mini-tour of the UK in Summer 2022. It was at this point that the idea to collaborate first emerged, and Clervaux sent over the a weighty unfinished drone piece built around fragments of strings from Verdi’s La forza del destino (‘The Force of Destiny’), an opera said to be cursed since it first premiered a century-and-a-half ago. Passed through tape delays, these snippets are augmented by a continuous sub-bassline and a droning shruti box, moving very slowly across three chord changes, ending on a resolving major by the end of the piece.

Dania completed the piece with extensive vocal performances recorded at her studio in Barcelona, responding to and expanding the music into new directions with layers of wordless singing to highlight Acción y Destino’s harmonic march. As Clervaux puts it, “the music suddenly had the sense of being finished, after years of being in progress.” The artwork comprises an edited image of the Rokeby Venus, painted by Spanish master Diego Velázquez in the mid-17th century. The painting was later butchered by suffragette Mary Richardson with a meat cleaver in 1914 to protest Emmeline Pankhurst’s arrest. The image, like the music, is filled with suggestion, creatively echoing past in present, and grafting existing works into new textures. [Words by Tristan Bath]

Released September 15, 2023