Marina Herlop Nekkuja

While she was waiting for her last album 'Pripyat' to be released, Catalan composer and producer Marina Herlop wasrestless. She was concerned about her (by then) uncertain music career, and felt emotionally unmoored. "Some days Iused to sit on the balcony of my flat to catch some sun," she explains, "I would close my eyes and start visualizing myselfas a gardener, pulling out purple weeds from the soil, every bad memory or emotion I wanted to expulse being one of theplants." As the days dragged on, the fantasy deepened, and Herlop discovered that parts of the garden was withering;the energy she had been putting into the non-musical side of her life had seeped into her creative pasture and poisonedit. She knew what she needed to do to overcome the blight: plant some seeds and tend to her art to help it blossom andbloom once again.'Nekkuja' is a place for Herlop's warmest, sweetest sentiments to rise to the surface and crack through thetopsoil. She describes the record as a way for her to seek and affirm inner light, and it's undoubtedly herbrightest, poppiest statement to date. The forward-thinking, experimental touches that nourished 'Pripyat' arestill present, but blessed with a level of positivity that's rare to find in a scene so entranced by darkness andmelancholy. Skittering fragments of ornate acoustic instrumentation provide a serene welcome to 'Busa',punctuated by precise electronic processes that shuttle the sound towards abstraction and fantasy. Herlop'svoice grows over the tangle of sounds from a childish giggle into a layered, matted mantra, soundingpassionate, hopeful and full of energy. The vitality spills over into 'Cosset', where she wraps powerful motifsaround ricocheting beats and dramatic piano rolls.Herlop's garden opens up dramatically on 'Karada' when bucolic field recordings crack like sunlight over harpplucks and willowy vocals. Her voice seems to bend around the whooshing streams and chittering of birds asif she's singing to the manicured land itse...