There are moments where growth and decay are indistinguishable, when it’s hard to say for sure if you’re falling to pieces or watching a sublime pre-language unfold. Lyrels’ Conocido is this riddle frozen in time and expanded. Its five tracks are a seamless meditation not on how it is that something becomes nothing, or how nothing is built back into something once again, but on the very real power of that thin sliver of meaning that lies in-between. Conocido exists in a space unafraid of destruction and similarly immune to the sentimentalism of creation. It blurs melody into a cautionary tale and sends pulse-like rhythms skittering out toward darkness, with the listener left to decide for herself what, if anything, has been gained or lost. This tension has its own way of speaking, in the form of old, inherited sounds that have been lost for too long and can only be uncovered through the focus of ritual. While what Lyrels draw forth is never really far from us, the strange, naked beauty of makes it feel nearly alien—or, maybe, capable of alienating us from what we think we know best about how things in this world rise and fall.

This cassette was dubbed in real time on chrome tape w/ j-card featuring photos by Karlos Rene Ayala and audio mastering from Jams P. Valentine.

Edition of 80