This autumn saw Yaara Valey return with Deshecha, a new EP of otherworldly, mostly instrumental tracks that continues this process, offering new views of some other side through disassembly of the established reality. Opener ‘May We’ captures this spirit, atmospheric and inherently natural, as though the songs do not conjure a soundscape so much as tap into something already in existence. A cleansing rite encoded not only in the title of the release—deshecha, undone—but in the titles of the songs themselves. May we be undone to be empty again and surrender.

After the slow dawn of ‘Be Undone To’ with its lurking latent energy, ‘Be Empty’ adds Valey’s voice and with it a new kind of urgency. For instead of words, Valey offers sounds, syllables, instinctive noises as they arise from the mouth and throat. The result is the antithesis of gibberish, the soulful vocals possessing meaning beyond words, instinctive within the sound itself.

The style follows through to it’s most overtly spiritual form on ‘Again’, a wordless hymn that conjures something from the air. Ghosts or something similar flitting around the track like moths to a flame, the climax of the ceremony that is the EP itself. Closer ‘And Surrender’ is therefore like the aftermath, a track newborn and tender, arising from the purged space free of the weight of history, its future its own.

With Deshecha, Yaara Valey explores the strangely intuitive duality between expansiveness and intimacy. Open spaces made personal, or the personal made open. The result is political in the most pressing sense, and spiritual in the least ostentatious—a spirituality that emerges from the textures of things, a newfound belief that has always been present to those who care to look.

Deshecha is out now via Antiquated Future Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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Songs for loving
Songs for surrendering liberation
Songs for ancestors
Songs for better days for reconnection to yourself songs for power

So begins the Yemas, the new album by Portland, Oregon soundscape artist Indira Valey. These opening lines feel like a mission statement, Valey outlining what is to come across the next seven tracks. Label Antiquated Future Records describe the album as “a series of seven short rituals offering brief peeks into alternate dimensions, past lives, and dream worlds.” It’s a fitting description of this fusion of ethereal melodies, poetic writing and a whole range of textures and tones, layered over one another in translucent layers like ghostly strata of bygone times.

From the softly turbulent ‘Haci Te Vas’, to the slinky almost Lynchian ‘Paso’, which creeps along like moonlight on the desert floor, Yemas is continually shifting, never settling into an easily-defined shape. The devotional quality I mentioned at the beginning is perhaps most apparent on ‘Straight Arrows’, initial choral vocals summoning Valey’s voice proper. “I am a blister turning to callus,” she sings with constrained fervour, “watch as my language reverses the spell.”

‘Vessel’ sounds haunted, ethereal layered vocals dopplering in and out of earshot over sparsely atmospheric guitar. Like much of what Indira Valey does, the song is full of dream-like juxtaposition, particularly in the clash between gauzy beauty and violent imagery, talk of a burning body, of a broken breastbone, of screams. Finale ‘Hold’ is an exercise in wordless atmosphere, Valey’s percussion clinking and clanging, her gentle wailing barely audible in the background. More than any other song on Yemas it sounds like an invocation, the drums opening up a portal to some other realm, a place we only see in glimpses, snatches of a faraway voice slipping through.

Yemas is out now and you can get it from the Antiquated Future Records Bandcamp page.

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