Mariola Membrives, flamenco pharaoh and the avant-garde in ‘La Babilonia’

After making severe pirouettes between popular song and avant-garde jazz (‘La llorona’, 2015) and allying himself with the cubist guitar of Marc Ribot to the health of old tunes (‘Lorca, Spanish songs’, 2019), Mariola Membrives surprises us with a somersault. ‘La Babilonia’ impresses from its resounding title, its science fiction cover and its convoluted texture: almost an hour of flowing music with flamenco singing, inclement stylistic transitions and a story with a feminist background woven through Mesopotamian mythological keys.

Let’s get some air. ‘The Babylon’ is here to absorb all our attention with its liberating story, a reflection of an ancient memory, which begins to meander with the naked moan of ‘La cantaora’, a ‘jonda’ calm before the storm. A remote voice of conscience immediately manifests itself, in the plural, in ‘La guardiana’, galloping over a ‘funky’ rhythm with electronic pollution and a ‘free’ trombone: “We have not come to caress you / We have not come to put ourselves under of your macho body / and moan and moan until you feel like you’re someone & rdquor ;, sings a split Membrives. And the warning: “All your power will be your jail & rdquor ;.

‘La Babilonia’ is an album with an angry righteous pulse, nonetheless made of poetic beauty and love of life, with which this artist born in Andújar (Jaén), raised in Córdoba and trained in Barcelona’s Esmuc, is accountable to her ghosts (abuse, the imposition of limits). she gets rid of a music emancipated from generic guidelines, with dissonant art-rock guitars and curtains of ‘spoken word’, layers of electronic fog and heartfelt lyrical detours violin in hand.

Developed as a songwriter (she signs all the material with two exceptions: ‘Moonchild’, by King Crimson, and the popular Greek ‘Álamo’), and well assisted, first of all, by the mutant guitarist (and producer) Javier Pedreira, unfolds a convulsive history, intertwined with citations to the Sumerian culture. From Tiamat, “the first female”, to the precepts of the Hammurabi code, such as that “Law 132” according to which “if a man’s wife is pointed out with her finger, she, even if she has not been discovered lying with the other man, she will have to throw herself into the divine river at the request of her husband & rdquor her;.

All that suffocating legacy of civilizations parades through the album (for now in ‘streaming’; the physical format, double album, is postponed due to manufacturing delays, common these days) accompanying us by ghostly and dreamy passages, pinches of rock and jazz with the flapping of the palms, until reaching the sensual calm of ‘El cama’, after the great burning. In the middle, the voice of Membrives, indomitable and perfectionist, who years ago paid honors to ‘Omega’, by Morente, and who now sees new horizons to continue expanding flamenco art. jordi bianciotto

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