Like any superhero team-up or buddy comedy, the formula for an RTJ song is carved in stone by now: Killer Mike the swaggering priest and El-P sardonic philosopher, threatening R-rated violence and revolutionary action over sounds rescued from hip-hop’s golden era and retrofitted for pre-pandemic festival stages. But in a year like this one, it breaks your heart. Heard at any time in the four decades since its making, “Echos” would be touching. Listening to “Echos” is as poignant as stumbling upon a roadside shrine of flowers, candles, and photos, but Ferreyra goes beyond creating a memorial to Mercedes: She defies death itself and resurrects her niece as an aural apparition. At other points, the melted murmurs and shimmered syllables feel soothing and psalm-like, as though the girl’s ghost is mourning herself. In places, the young woman’s voice flickers and trembles with playful delight, sounding impossibly alive. Recorded in 1978 but released for the first time this year, the piece is woven entirely from the voice of Ferreyra’s niece Mercedes Cornu, who died in a car accident prior to its composition.
Argentine composer Beatriz Ferreyra is renowned for the disorienting spatiality and shape-shifting abstraction of her electronic and tape-based work, but it’s the human scale and raw intimacy of “Echos” that startle.
