On duendita’s tender debut, 2018’s direct line to My Creator, the Queens singer-songwriter explored spirituality, grief, and the importance of lineage in whorls of painterly detail. Her work casts soul music through an experimental prism, combining shuffling beats and sparse guitar and bass around a voice with the resonant grace of a cello. Six years later, duendita returns with the mind is a miracle, a reflective and spellbinding EP recorded largely in Berlin and released this past summer. Here, she expands on her immersive, heartfelt music, crafting an expressive meshwork of ambient, soul, and pop music against languid, piano-laced backdrops.
duendita hasn’t been absent since her first LP; in March, she debuted Sound Riveran audiovisual project focused on New York’s East River. To make it, she toted around a handheld recorder, using it to catch errant neighborhood sounds or dunking it into the river itself to see what reverberations she could gather. The excavatory use of field recordings extends to the mind is a miracle, where from-life snippets add depth and grain to meditations on mental health and self-confidence. Piano and the sound of chirping birds and insects captured during a trip to California’s Redwood National Park open the EP, giving way to the gently strummed guitar of “multi.” “There were times where I was hurting but I try not show it,” she admits, before a curlicuing melody pointedly turns her mood around: “Ooh, believe it, bitch/I’m beaming and it overflows.” Voice memos of friends, family, and herself punctuate the EP with a sense of community and collaboration that has long been an essential element of her creative output.
duendita pairs that emerging sense of self-confidence with pillow-soft music. “Yeah, I don’t mind no waiting/My Lord, He made me patient,” she sings over warm guitar on the brief, lovely “planetary,” fleshing out the prayer-minded work on direct line to My Creator. Her inclination toward soothing sounds is a way to shed inhibitions and find truth in bare-bones simplicity, whether through lyrics or compositions. Chicago musician Erik Hunter (aka Matthew Skillz) contributes a mellow, rippling bassline on “alright!”; New York-based bassoonist Joy Guidry’s hypnotic, lilting performance on “feel” moves like an ebbing tide behind duendita’s impassioned pleas. “Silence is violence, baby boy, don’t you hide it,” she sings tranquilly, “Still your smile gets me so excited.”
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