- Using samples of Mayan instruments of old, Debit creates an eerie and uncanny future—and one of the best ambient records of the year.
- Delia Beatríz started work on The Long Count, her second LP as Debit, during her music technology studies at NYU. Exploring the AI music-generation tools that she would eventually use to create the record, she was disappointed to realize that the data sets they processed were all from Western music. Searching for data from her own heritage (Beatríz is Mexican-American), she wound up at the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
There, she uncovered snippets of recordings of Late Classic Mayan instruments, which she fed into machine learning software, producing a set of digital instruments that incorporate their analog ancestors. Playing them produced an ambient record interwoven with musique concrète influences that also functions as an unorthodox form of cultural preservation. Beatríz's imagination fills in archival gaps to make music that's much more accessible—both sonically and physically—than the samples it's based on.
Listeners of Beatríz's go-hard-or-go-home DJ sets, or her most recent EP System, might find this surprising. She occupies what she has called poles of electronic music—club and ambient—and for a long time has played around with reconciling them. Her debut album Animus was her first attempt, and tracks like "Lamat" and "Power Chords" now sound like early hints at The Long Count. The next EP, Love Discipline, leaned on noisy effects and took her further down the path. After System's detour back into club, The Long Count brings all of her interests together: circuit hacking, instrument building and soundscapes that speak to her sensibilities.
Ocarinas, flutes and other woodwinds made up the majority of the Mayan samples. Their breathy, organic textures allows Beatríz to manipulate them into something like voices in wordless conversation. Opener "1st Night" is all sighing exhales, while closer "7th Night" puts heavy panting over a ghostly whine, turning the conversation into an argument between competing tonal qualities. On "3rd Night" and "5th Day" the voices sound like screaming in a good, bracing way—think the soundtrack an artsy horror movie. But a constant, rumbling low-end and more recognizable synthesizer effects keep all this ethereality from venturing into a cappella vocal territory.
There are also more conventional "ambient" moments, though Beatríz never settles there for long. Gentle synth sweeps make "5th Night" a soothing moment of rest in between the weirder stuff (but short bursts of white noise keep it from being totally comforting). Dreamiest is "7th Night," where woodwinds float over glacial chords before morphing into a series of sustained tense notes. This is the type of ambient music that feels like it's going somewhere, balancing urgency with contemplation.
Beatríz's soundscapes are familiar and organic, but also otherworldly and uncanny. These complex and contradictory feelings come down to a sort of vertical integration: Beatríz is not just a producer but also a sound engineer, so she has finely tuned not only the compositions themselves, but their presentation and their source material. The effect is truly haunting and hauntological, using the past to evoke an unrealized future—one where this original Mayan art survived as more than just fragments. Not merely an excavation into the past, it sings with new ideas that expand ambient music far beyond what we're used to.
Beatríz calls her creations "ancestral technology," an idea that suggests an anti-colonial world-building sensibility similar to Afrofuturism. In both cases, cultural knowledge is itself a technology, and technology in the more familiar sense—machines, digital worlds, and the like—is a tool for building a universe where racist and imperialist violence are either long gone or never existed. Although we will never hear that world, the one that Beatríz conjures on Long Count is both beautiful and strange, a meditation on innovation sourced from ancient knowledge.
Tracklist01. 1st Day
02. 1st Night
03. 5th Night
04. 3rd Night
05. 2nd Day
06. 5th Day
07. 6th Night
08. 4th Night
09. 7th Day
10. 7th Night