Over the last decade there has been a contagion of forms and ideas from some traditional music into electronic music. The phenomenon isn’t new and it’s one of those ideas that gets recycled. Recycling is important because, without it, it would be almost impossible to build on what already exists, or even on top of the new. It’s essential to feel how the new generations appropriate an idea to the time in which they live, how they use that idea with the language and tools they use now. It’s been happening everywhere, but Catalonia is home to two of the most exciting names experimenting with these ideas and placing them in another division: Marina Herlop and Tarta Relena. Marina Herlop is one of those comets, she benefited from the context in which many people got to know her (the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic), plus an inexhaustible stage presence, playing almost every week somewhere for the last two years. Tarta Relena, using a competition expression, have benefited less from public support. Okay, that’s not so true, the duo made up of Marta Torrella and Helena Ros have played many European electronic festivals – and beyond – in recent years and have created an audience that embraces this identity that is as raw as it is heavenly.

And this is where Tarta Relena differentiate themselves. Unlike other projects of their kind, whose connection is always more to the electronic – to the present, to fashion, to the current – than to the traditional, they work on the idea of emptiness, of echo, of a notion of silence as something sacred. They take the next step. They experiment with sounds, above all, and first, with the voice. There’s a principle of a cappella, of listening to each other in that register and going from there to the rest. The electronics are something that complements, that dresses and, if we may say so, is not what makes us move straight away. What moves us, what makes us want to exist in the same space as Tarta Relena’s songs, is the sense of space that is created by the pauses, the silences, the gaps between the words. Time is never too much, it’s the sensation that is immense. As if their music gave us time to listen to ourselves, to reflect, to feel an idea of the sacred that they themselves have created with their music. Hearing them at St George’s Church seems more than appropriate. Until then, there are some great albums to discover: ‘Fiat Lux’, ‘És Pregunta’ and ‘Ora Pro Nobis’. AS