got the whole room dancing
La Linea is the London Latin Music festival showcasing the best of Latin Music and its most exciting established and up and coming musicians across different venues in London. Performing at the Jazz Café were Maria Arnal and Queralt Lahoz, two Catalonian artists who bought completely different sounds to an unusual headliner pairing.
Maria Arnal’s performance was all clean-lined presentation and blurred sounds. Her stage presence was understated but powerful, with the intensity of her music broken up by the low-key charm of her stage manner. Her music is a mixture of avant-pop, electronics and traditional polyphonic music, where the influence of traditional folk music is melded and forged into a futuristic, silver sound.
Arnal has recently released a new album, Ama, with the performance featuring many of her new songs. Her extraordinary voice ducks and weaves around the synthesized backing voices. During the concert Arnal tells the audience of one of the main influences of the album, the words of Sappho, the Grecian lyric poet: ‘what you have left to say will remain to be cried.’ She tells the audience the album is about tears – of joy, grief, release, regret.
Her strength as an artist is grounding the experimentation of her sound with a voice that stays true and resonant with human emotion, soaring above the complexities of interweaving sounds. A highlight was ‘Que me Quiten’, where the melody starts accompanied by a light quavering sound, to slowly build in depth and layers until it reaches a climax to abruptly cut off, leaving the crowd breathless. ‘Tú que vienes a rondarme’, one of Arnal’s most well-loved songs, was received with delight, with its whirling poeticism and hypnotic simplicity.
Queralt Lahoz’s energy created a complete change, bursting onto the stage with a toss of her long hair. Her music merges the traditional influences of flamenco and bolero with hip-hop, pop and dancehall, and her performance got the whole room dancing (potentially even those sitting having a classy cocktail in the upstairs restaurant area). With the slight rasp in her voice, a black corset and the uninhibited passion of her performance, there was a hint of the modern-day Carmen – if Carmen sang with hip-hop influences. She had the audience irresistibly moving to catchy tunes such as ‘Santa Rosa’, and she exuded the contagious enjoyment of a performer who loves her stage and her audience, finishing off an evening that aptly demonstrated the caliber of talent in the Latin music scene right now.
La Linea Festival runs until Wednesday 6th May across various venues in London. Tickets available here: https://comono.co.uk/la-linea/