Lorelle Meets The Obsolete
Mexican psych duo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete might be on their seventh album, though their latest 'Corporal' feels like a new beginning. Lorena Quintanilla (Lorelle) and Alberto González (The Obsolete) have upped the electronic quota in a bid to rock the body and shake off the perpetual bad news cycle. What may surprise readers is that this album nearly never happened at all.
“We’d kind of decided to stop the band,” admits Quintanilla, aka Lorelle. “We were in a crisis. And then we started jamming just to forget about that. We were looking for some pleasure that electronic music was giving us, because it's hypnotic, and it goes to the body also, hence the name Corporal.”
“In Spanish, the context of the word for body - cuerpo - is really wide,” explains González. “The body means freedom, sovereignty, resistance, protection, shelter, joy.”
“In Mexico, the meaning of giving freedom to the body is different, right?” adds Quintanilla. “We have to really find pleasure in every moment and I guess that's somehow what we were thinking when we were writing these songs. We have this problem here where a lot of people are disappearing. Right now we’re in Guadalajara, and yesterday we were just walking through this park and there were all these pictures of people who’ve disappeared.”
Songs like 'Ker', moreover, are intensely political, in defense of personal sovereignty of the body and pushing back at the desire of powerful men to control women’s reproductive rights. That anger and frustration is coupled with music that often transcends the harsh realities of modern living in Mexico.
“We were getting invitations regularly to DJ sets in a bar in our hometown,” says González, referring to the port city of Ensenada where the couple live these days, “and something that we really liked about those experiences was just seeing the reaction of people to the music. So those nights shaped what we were doing in a natural way. It wasn’t conscious at all.”
It was a love of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd that set González on the path, while a slightly later iteration of the band introduced him to electronic music: “I remember the first time I watched 'Live At Pompeii' when I was in secondary school. They were using electronics and I couldn't understand what was happening. You could see Richard Wright with all the keyboards and everything and it looked so, so cool, but I couldn’t understand it. I guess those were the types of moments that changed my life.”
Lorelle Meets The Obsolete will be playing in the UK next May at the invitation of Sonic Cathedral. They signed for the fine London label a decade ago while playing a show to five people on the peripheries of South By South West in Austin, Texas, and just happened to catch the ear of one of those in the sparsely attended venue. “This guy asked us to play there at 11am or something,” says Quintanilla, “so we didn’t hold out much hope.”
“It was funny because we only knew of Sonic Cathedral from maybe a month earlier,” says González. “We’d discovered them via a 13th Floor Elevators tribute album ['The Psychedelic Sounds Of The Sonic Cathedral'] that we liked a lot. It wasn’t like we had great shows there, but just that one show made the trip worthwhile.”
- Jeremy Allen
PROG FILE
Lineup: Lorena Quintanilla (vocals, guitar, synths), Alberto González (bass, synths, drums and percussion)
Sounds like: Progressive electronic, psychedelic music that is angry and transcendent at the same time, undercut with psych and shoegaze.
Current release: //Corporal//, out now on Sonic Cathedral