In music, the concept of experimentation – and its endless list of synonyms – is often used in the same sense as that contained in Ángel González’s irreverent poem, launched against those bards who try on metaphors like bras with the sole purpose of looking graceful. in front of the mirror and achieve the instant admiration of the observer. However, there are those for whom this bold term is an inherent part of the very nature of their proposal, as in the case of Elena Setien. A biography, personal and artistic, marked by an accumulation of learning, nourished both by his various residences on the world map and by a curriculum to which is added the mastery of classical music and his participation in combos associated with jazz, which leads completely logic in a fascinating and particular way of approaching pop. A language that observes continuous regeneration in terms of absorbing varied generic circumscriptions or locating it in present temporal spaces. A blurring of borders that places us on a map outlined by a characteristic tense environment but displayed with subtlety.
Particularities of a career that in her new album also point to her own inspirational seed, found in the San Sebastian native’s fascination with the rhythmic beats of Wilco’s drummer, Glenn Kotche, grouped in his series “A Beat A Week.” From that enthusiasm, the collaboration between them, added to that of their usual partner in the technical recording tasks, Mikel Azpiroz, forms the backbone of an album that inevitably welcomes relative greater dynamism. Lightening of the step in which the exchange of his usual priority instrument, the piano, for the six strings also plays an essential role, a new affinity spurred by knowledge, following the recommendation of Steve Gunn, of the work of Bridget St. John, from which he takes that notion of rest and spatiality to finish outlining his current songs. Elements that establish a relationship fertile enough to define with identifying precision a work that, despite this, at no time ceases to be another link in the recognizable and admirable terrain conquered by Elena Setien along these years.
Having as a direct antecedent of his novel publication that created in a time of pandemic, “Unfamiliar Minds”, and which was especially dark in the transmission of this global uncertainty, makes it “Moonlit Reveries” presents itself as the confirmation of a journey that seems to have left said disturbance to locate itself in a territory stripped of so many shadows and with enough tools to glimpse pieces of the sky. And not only in a symbolic sense, because the album has as a backdrop for those usual dreamscapes of which the San Sebastian native is the owner of a complex environmental scenario, where each of its elements seems to be invoked in response to the concern that so much urgency monopolizes our walk. Landscapes not only described lyrically but also transferred to sound pieces that simultaneously act as photographs or paintings that are heard, of course, but also observed.
Although that old guitar strum, a countryman of John Fahey or Bert Jansch, will be presented as the protagonist – not absolute – throughout this itinerary, it will alternate intensities in its pulsation, acting as vital constants associated with each song, generally suspended in a also changing ecosystem that in its disturbing but suggestive conceptual formulation is equally twinned with Mary Lattimore, Jim O’Rourke or Tindersticks. An impetuous execution of those six strings in “Hard Heart” that immerses itself in a space of bucolic serenity – with an atmospheric and disturbing crescendo – from which stands out an interpretation by Elena Setién clearly dictated from a close-up. An instrument, a word perfectly applicable to her voice, which will be handled with ductility until it becomes the ruler of the emotional climate, as demonstrated by the tremulous intonation, so characteristic of PJ Harvey, chosen to offer even more meaning to the title of “Strange”; the whispering intimacy that “Losing Control” displays, a vindication to ignore the fear of making mistakes carried by our insides, or the reflective elegance that its homonymous song demonstrates.
The more relaxed pace with which this album often moves has a lot to do with the selection of percussive rhythms of jazzy agility that will serve as the introductory sequence to a “Surfacing” with a penetrating and ghostly echo or the tribal beat with which it guides the destinations of “Asking” until taking her to the depths of the Appalachians. Geographic compass that will be turned until it is oriented to the Brazilian bays through which those “Colored Lizards” seem to travel or even the vaporous one, with soul reminiscences manifested as if it were a hypnotic Nina Simone, “Peculiar”.
The ultimate aspiration of any creator is the desire to make the definition of their work through standardized categories totally ineffective. An achievement that only a select few can boast of, those who transform their own name into the only valid concept to unravel its characteristics, a privileged situation that this work holds like the entire career of its author. “Moonlit Reveries” is another captivating gateway to the copious musical imagination of the San Sebastian native, a space that can only be accessed by her hand, and the fact that it is a work with a greater vitalist spirit means that its traces, still prey to that unsettling existential mystery , seem to have discovered certain shortcuts to serenity.