Las Fuerzas Almadas
Dat Garcia
Dat Garcia
Dat García in the house
The musician and producer Dat Garcia, is set to release her third record, Las Fuerzas Almadas on April 1st 2022 via ZZK Records.
Recorded in her studio and hotel rooms on tour, these eleven tracks created with charangos, ronrocos, synthesizers and plenty of vocal effects, reflect the beauty of all that is transformed, from monstrosity understood as honesty, desire, authenticity, the heterogeneous versus the hegemonical. “That place of false comfort of local customs compared to the outer edges where the unique things that truly gratify us live.” It’s a cultural alert that brings new meaning to strength and power, reinterpreting them as the life energy of the movement and transformation. A constant creator, feeling her way in the dark—she’s also designed costumes, scenographies and scripts for shows—Dat finds meaning in her works as she progresses, “trusting that my process will lead me to a new, unfamiliar place.”
So it is that Las Fuerzas Almadas—a name that came to her in a dream—comes across as a natural but developed consequence of her previous records: the debut Ermitaño Interior (2013) in which she created a work of introspection that led her to discover her “face as a healthy, happy-go-lucky person who covered up everything that was actually destroying me”; and its successor, Maleducada (2017), recorded in hospital during chemotherapy treatment, the result of understanding disease as a symptom of a scarce or zero emotional education: “Awakening a ‘me’ that was very obedient to being told what to do, always trying to please others at the expense of my own existence.”
Las Fuerzas Almadas is another step in the life game of discovering (yourself): “I don’t believe myself when I force myself to be someone else, I’m a slave to my mind. I’ve learned to be again,” she sings on “Todos Tienen Un Plan”. Dat crosses over atmospheres and genres to create catchy, danceable music with some dark edges. She observes reality like a radiant animal that went away to get to know itself and now knows how all its organs and muscles work, the hormones it produces, the neurons that are activated. “You can’t sneeze with your eyes open but I can recognize a perverse cover-up,” she says in “Ser Humano.” She communicates with cats better than with the “billions of people dancing in the dark,” but all the same she wants to take part in the transformation of the world: “Eradicating violent beliefs is this movement’s mission,” in “El Día Fuera del Tiempo.” A love song for the earth, a call to combat psychological apathy, the inertia of digital communication and reconstruct magical bonds with the everyday.
“I have a four-year-old daughter. While she’s growing up, I’m taking myself apart. One day she replied to me: ‘I don’t do that because I’m calm.’ We diagnosed her as a ‘calm girl,’ she believes it and acts accordingly. That’s how humanity lives. They declare in some way what we must be: poor, rich, mothers, doctors, losers. This syndrome of prefabricated beings affects us intimately. When do we discover and allow ourselves to be who we are? I want to be that monster that lets the chaos in. The chaos makes me peculiar and random and I allow it. I allow myself to be who I am and change as many times as it takes. If we artists are the historians and the faith healers of our time, this album sets out to take back words lost in mental battles and recover the power over us: the forces that have come with the souls in their hands.”