Marina Herlop’s primary interest is aesthetics. She’ll say her songs aren’t autobiographical, and the pianist’s penchant for dropping made-up language into digitally manipulated audio environments can make it difficult for listeners to ground her work in something familiar. But with enough scrutiny, you can follow clues that situate her evolving output within a number of personal anecdotes—say, growing up in Catalonia, living through a climate crisis, or falling in love with Romantic composers such as Claude Debussy. But you don’t need those facts—or any facts, really—to appreciate Herlop’s intricately brocaded songs. You’ll just experience them slightly differently if you do.
Herlop, whose stage name condenses her government surname “Hernández López,” traffics in an avant-garde art-pop tradition shared by artists such as Lyra Pramuk and Björk. Her work is as organic, precise, and beautiful as it is otherworldly, tangled, and fraught. Herlop is fascinated by music as a universal language that can express something beyond words, and her albums borrow as much from her formal training in Western classical music as from her investigations into cross-cultural classical traditions, including Carnatic music from southern India. To promote her third record, Pripyat, released last year through Berlin-based cult electronic label Pan, she used photos of herself in a barren desert, wearing a soft pink latex cheongsam and coiffed Princess Leia buns connected by chains. She insistently beckons onlookers into her inner world, where she aspires to beauty in an imagined multicultural future where aesthetics can exist in a vacuum. This tour is in support of Herlop’s upcoming fourth album, Nekkuja, which comes out October 27.
Marina Herlop Sun 10/8, 8 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $18, $15 in advance, 21+