The album begins by cracking open a time capsule: An eerie melody sung by what sounds like an old woman strains through vinyl distortion, as though arriving from a great distance. In a way, it has: The song, “Deixem lo dol” (which means something like “let us not mourn”) is a relic of local Holy Week traditions; the archival recording was made years ago by a woman in Saint Augustine, Florida, where a contingent of Menorcans arrived in the late 1700s. Immediately it becomes clear that Ferrer wants to bring this music forward in time: As she braids her own voice with the spooky crackle of the recording, she is accompanied by a plucky synth arpeggio. The result is part Alan Lomax, part Wendy Carlos.
A careful blend of simplicity and pathos gives the album its power. In “Malanat,” drawn from two field songs she turned up in her archival research, Ferrer sings of aching backs and crops going to seed, tracing an ancient-sounding melody over a subdued organ drone. If it sounds like a song of mourning, that’s because it is: She has described the song as an homage to the island’s rural traditions, traditions that are rapidly disappearing—fields once shimmering with wheat have become plots for summer homes and swimming pools.
Ferrer is part of a wave of Spanish musicians intent on interrogating regional folk traditions, along with artists like de Elche, Tarta Relena, Maria Arnal i Marcel Bages, and even Rosalía, who got her start as a maverick flamenco singer. For Ferrer, that means responding to the reality of the present moment. One of a few original compositions on the album, although set to a traditional melody, “Glosa a Menorca” sounds almost like ambient folk, with fingerpicked guitarrón dissolving into an airy mist. Ferrer’s lyrics, however, are pointed: She sings of dying fish, drying aquifers, and young people forced out by a rapacious real estate market. It is a song of fierce—and fiercely protective—love.
Her passion also comes through in the wildness of the album’s highlights, which sound as gnarled and weatherbeaten as Menorca’s native ullastre, a species of wild olive tree. In “Voldria lo que voldria,” she intones a darkly hypnotic melody over a ritualistic drumbeat, while yelps and ululations enfold her—a snapshot, perhaps, of the anarchic ecstasy that characterizes the annual celebrations of the island’s small towns. The closing “M’agrada s’espigolar” takes that livewire energy and turns it ethereal. This is another field song; it consists of a single repeated stanza: “M’agrada s’espigolar/I es nar replegant espigues/Per tenir un tros de pa/Per menjar amb un plat de figues” (“I love to go reaping/And gathering wheat/To have a piece of bread/To eat with a plate of figs”). The refrain is sung first by Pilar Pons, a celebrated local folksinger; then, with every loop, Ferrer adds another multitracked harmony. Gradually, what begins as a song about cyclical patterns and simple pleasures builds into a chorus of dizzying harmonic complexity. It feels charged with almost supernatural force, like a hall of mirrors reflecting back on the untold generations and countless harvests that gave the song its timeless shape.
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