Lana Del Rabies made a grand re-entrance in 2023 with STREGA BEATA, her first record after a five-year game of hide and seek. With this album, she planted her flag firmly in the realm of dark electronic and experimental music, infusing it with a flavor of apocalyptic angst that’s more maximal than your uncle’s holiday light display.
This isn’t your garden-variety musical endeavour. Lana Del Rabies, the brainchild of Phoenix multimedia artist and producer Sam An – refuses to be hemmed in by the pedestrian boundaries of genre. Del Rabies is an avant-garde master lamenting the wounded world,” suffused with echoes of trip-hop, early experimental post-punk in the vein of Fad Gadget and John Foxx; the eerie mystery of Delia Derbyshire’s experiments for the BBC, a whiff of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the atmospheric noise collages of Puce Mary and Zola Jesus’s alter ego NIKA. The resulting hauntingly beautiful soundscape ripples through us with the energies of grief, loss, and despair.
Lana Del Rabies explores the ethereal crevices between dreams, a kind of auditory alchemy that stirs up wonder and transcendent immersion. In short, this sorceress conjures spirit through song.
STREGA BEATA is best described as an apocalyptic fairy tale set to a dense, emotive symphony of existential dread and cathartic release, wrapped in a title that hints at otherworldly escapades. A cryptic “Mother” figure delivers her oracle; her voice a patchwork of eerie harmonies, whispered secrets, desperate cries, and the occasional frenetic scream aimed at another character, the proverbial chosen one.
Now, as we saunter into 2024, Lana Del Rabies is remixing this mythic opus. Becoming Everything: Strega Beata Remixed transforms the source material through the lens of gothic industrial. This version is a veritable who’s who of the industrial, darkwave, and experimental music scene, featuring collaborations with both the crème de la crème and the bright-eyed newcomers of the genre: Plack Blague, MVTANT, Bara Hari, and the cadenced experimental opera from the mastery of White Boy Scream and Cruel Diagonals.
“There is a specific type of grief that comes from witnessing the brutality of what humans are capable of towards each other,” An remarked upon the album. “If that grief goes unprocessed, it is doomed to also manifest as brutality. “There have been many moments while writing this record that I was grieving through an event that was personal or worldwide, and then another sudden, tragic event would happen. I needed to re-evaluate what I wanted to say because my world and perspective had shifted again. Trying to keep up with tragedy can make one feel helpless, and one way to feel in control is through acts of destruction. My personal impulse towards destruction nearly ended this project.”
Becoming Everything: Strega Beata Remixed is out now. Order here, and listen below:
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