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Ylia

Ame Agaru

Ylia--aka Susana Hern?ndez--had a remarkably productive 2020. In addition to releasing her debut
album, Dulce Rendici?n, on Barcelona's Paralaxe Editions, she penned compilation tracks for Lapsus
Records, Hivern Discs, and Super Utu/Stars on Earth.
But professional success can be deceiving: The following year was, personally speaking, terrible. Her
grandfather died. Her father died. Her cat died. And she ended a relationship. ''That's a lot of things
all at once, no?'' she says.
Her second album, Ame Agaru, is not necessarily a record of that year, but it is, she says, a response
to those life events--a record of grief.
The new album is clearly a continuation of the ambient investigations of Ylia's debut, but it differs in
key ways. Where Dulce Rendici?n was exploratory and faintly cosmic, Ame Agaru--a Japanese
phrase meaning, roughly, ''the rain lifts''-- captures a melancholy sense of stillness. And where her
debut was largely electronic, on the new album, Ylia has folded in a number of acoustic elements,
even when they are not recognizable as such. Her partner, Alejandro L?var, lends fingerpicked
acoustic guitar to the glowing dronescapes of ''Todos los Cuerpos''; multi-instrumentalist and
bandleader Tete Leal adds flutes, clarinet, and soprano saxophone to ''Ame Agari''--or ''after the
rain''--which opens the album with a moment of contemplative calm, the kind that follows an
extended deluge.
One track, the dub techno-influenced ''Flowers in June,'' grew out of Ylia's live sets, but the rest are
the fruit of improvisational sessions at home in M?laga, five minutes from the beach--jamming and
then refining, searching for the ideal expression of a feeling as it was first captured. Searching for the
spontaneity behind the stillness. In places, Ylia even incorporates piano, an instrument she has
played since she was 10, yet has never included on one of her recordings before. For the most part
on Ame Agaru, she seeks ways to fuse piano with synthesizers and electronic processes. But on the
closing track, ''El ?nico Adi?s Posible,'' she leaves us alone with the instrument in all its stark,
unadorned beauty. It is a profoundly moving conclusion to an album defined by its economy of means
and purity of expression: a cycle of life counted out in the passage of storm clouds and clearing skies.