Having worked under the likes of Linda Buckley and Alistair Macdonald as part of her electroacoustic and contemporary composition training from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Darlene Zarabozo is a Cuban-American composer with a wide ranges of influences and interests, from the classical basis of her study to pop acts such as Lady Gaga and Bon Iver. After all, Zarabozo describes her mission as “find[ing] a balance between the familiar and unfamiliar; to strike a personal note with something people don’t know how to define.”
This sentiment is central to her latest release, Cheap Emotions. The songs in effect serve as a bridge between the high art sensibilities of classical music and something more accessible, electronic samples and spoken word segments lending a real immediacy. And the balance between the familiar and unfamiliar extends beyond style too, with the meaning of the pieces emerging ambiguous but intuitive, leading the listener into something strange yet undeniably rooted in the human experience.
Lead track ‘The Inevitable Withdrawal’ is the perfect example. A collaboration with the writer Phoebe McGowan, the song represents a melding of two separate pieces—those of music and writing, the personalities of Zarabozo and McGowan—blurring the boundary between two discrete entities if only for a moment. Rising from thin and feathered electronics, wisps of spoken word glide across the sonic canvas, always fleeting and always removed, concerned with the end of things. This sense of transience is fundamental, as though illustrating that nothing can exist for long within such a commingled state. A reminder that things are always fading, and that with impermanence comes both tragedy and beauty.
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The others songs on the release follow the thread set out by ‘The Inevitable Withdrawl’, probing down the avenues it opened and seeking out new ground. ‘Mind the___Gap’ continues further into ambient pop, crooned vocals swirling beyond a flurry of apologies and garbled talk. But even within the moments of rising energy, a sense of distance remains, as though it is all but an echo. ‘Do You Remember?’ finds further levels of vigour, possessing that scrambled-mind volatility that comes in the aftermath of things, that moment in which the end has arrived but the realisation has not.
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Cheap Emotions is out now and available from the Darlene Zarabozo Bandcamp page.