YAARA VALEY “Deshecha” C23 (Antiquated Future)

Dabbling within ditch and gloom, glitch and doom, Yaara Valey leads a seance of one with lute, breath, and a mastery of mixing chanted loops, reverbed out tribal percussion, delay-heavy pluck, and passing tech anomaly. Her dynamic, contralto delivery is only matched by an expertly layered mile-high pile of harmony & counterpoint; the end result is nothing short of bewitching.

With all tracks repeated on each side and clocking in at 23 minutes, it’s easy to listen to this entire release back to back to back before you even notice it’s over. Bewitching!

https://antiquatedfuture.bandcamp.com/album/deshecha

and/or

https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/fluid-electric

—Jacob An Kittenplan

YAARA VALEY “Deshecha” (Antiquated Future)

 

Once Indira, now Yaara Valey has clearly spent too much time bingeing Game of Thrones during the pandemic, siding for some reason with the Greyjoys and lobbing a softball of a joke setup that I can only manage to get out of the infield because of the surprisingly obsolete, nay antiquated reference. (That’s two jokes in one. You’re welcome.) Seriously, doesn’t it seem lame to talk about Game of Thrones already? Pop culture truly moves at dizzying speeds.
 
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, we get deep into another superb EP by the Portland, Oregon, high priestess of ritualistic freak folk, the droning and engrossing Deshecha. Over five hallowed tracks, Valey concocts pagan ceremonies to nature, of “emptying” our earthly vessels, “undoing” our conceptions, “and surrendering” to the earth, the natural state of things. The quoted items are paraphrases of three of five song titles, so you can really get a sense of the theme running through Deshecha. As such, the EP isn’t a lighthearted one, even though the touch is quite light. I mean, of course, that the sounds produce (or are produced by) magic, filling your body with tingling sparks and lifting you (maybe literally) into the night sky. Valey then tends the fire she has built and continues to draw in more followers. Let’s join up.
 
https://indiravaley.bandcamp.com/
 
https://antiquatedfuture.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan