Marina Herlop

The future began when Marina Herlop sat down at her computer. After two albums of intricate piano impressionism and marvellous vocal techniques, the singer and pianist sampled her voice and piano with software, innovatively enough that music journalism couldn’t help but draw comparisons with pioneers like Björk or Meredith Monk. With “Pripyat”, the classically trained Catalan composer, vocalist and pianist channels her environment in a truly post-human way; Herlop performs alien vocal acrobatics, drawing inspiration from the Carnatic music of South India, while planting a diversity of sonic seeds that bloom brilliantly in her sumptuous garden of chimerical compositions, produced for the first time exclusively electronically.

Named after the abandoned, nuclear-ravaged city in Ukraine, “Pripyat” is filled with metronomic rhythmic synth surfaces and deconstructed beats and tones. Herlop sings about it in her own invented (non-)language, overlapping various vocal lines and creating choral pop songs of supernatural beauty. In this return to Portugal, the artist presents herself with a concert designed for two heritage spaces, the National Pantheon (Lisbon) and the Ruins of Milreu (Faro).