Review of ‘Magma’, Nita’s album beyond Fuel Fandango

To paraphrase one of Fuel Fandango’s hits, music, like life, has been sprouting, opening a path and climbing towards a new future and origin. Nita reborn from the center of the earth with “Magma”a beautiful and visceral solo debut that, from the intimacy and the left side of the chest, expands into ten tracks that exude light, magnetic dance and its own pulse. Andalusian roots and electronic wings coexist organically, like a fresh breeze that borders on miracle after a hot day. With the essence intact and brave that zigzags between tradition and the contemporary, the artist from Córdoba continues to demonstrate a high-quality poetic sensitivity, with that need to connect with our environment and with ourselves as a central philosophy and only way of healing in a sick world, increasingly distant from reality, individualistic and interested. A spiritual ritual of flesh and flowers in which the transforming magma that comes to the surface to create new worlds is united and melted, with that other vital miracle that lives in the womb.

For the architecture and sound universe of the album, Nita team up again (they already collaborated on the addictive single “The Retama” in 2021) with Santiago Gonzalo, better known artistically as Bronquio. The Jerez producer is one of the most sought-after musicians today, marking a before and after together with Rocío Márquez with “Third heaven” (22) and forming other magical pairs, as in “Broken Hat” (19), where he accompanied the always brilliant and creatively effervescent Kiko Veneno, a musician whose right-hand man is currently the key player in his next and long-awaited work.

From the singing of the birds and that new voice that is infinite union and was within it, we begin the atmospheric journey and awakening: “There is an infinity in which there is only love… / if you wake up.” An “Infinito” as an intro and we fall immediately into the spell of beats and dance celebrating motherhood and a new life, with the singing of Nita caressing and scratching each other with the same naturalness in “Miracle 18:08”. Truth and flame in the body, emotion and gratitude that mark a path of synthesized yellow tiles and very careful electronic textures that dilute, envelop and unify all the songs.

Faced with a society in constant acceleration, automaton and anesthetized by artificial links that float upside down after the first clip on screens and social networks of all kinds, generating polarization, emptiness and chaining us without us realizing it, Nita Together with Bronchio, it offers us as a remedy grooves through which music advances with an open heart, like red-hot lava under a moon of mirrors that rotates slowly, seeking to recover what is essential, the embrace with nature and human emotions. That’s what we find and feel “in the stillness under the tree” of “Forget-me-not blue”, crossing the wound of the world, with Bronquio playing at the electronic controls with the voice of Nita and weaving a sound landscape overflowing with nuances, introspective and expansive at times, with the creator from Córdoba reminding us that beauty and love always endure inside the human being, transforming with her song “the pain in water, light and movement.”

“We spiral into the void of the universe,” but there are always eyes that save us and connect with our own, in this or any other life, windows of light and harmony that show the direction, even if the most absolute chaos surrounds us; “Reincarnation”, two bodies that are one, one “We walked without looking for each other, but knowing that we were walking to find each other.” Another delicate piece that surrounds us with atmospheres and final tribal rhythms that seem to float in outer space, like Nita’s naked voice and that flamenco pinch that leaves its mark between synthesizers. In “See me dance” the electronics take the controls, stretching and expanding their song over mists of brilliant darkness that accelerate the pulse and gain intensity, until teleporting us (under the mantra “I listen to the voices that guide me, / they like to see me dance”) to a nightclub where the ritual achieves healing catharsis. The power of dance beyond any superficial use, as an ancestral and liberating possession of an ever-present identity: “I know what I am and what I have come from, / I will never forget.”

We reach the equator with “Life jacket”, one of the most beautiful, sophisticated and top-of-the-skin tracks of the lot. “I would like to get lost with you / and never appear… / I would like to get lost with you / to start over.” Electronic goldsmithing with Nita’s singing more hypnotic and exciting than ever, natural and dissolving together with sound textures that flow and float “like a life preserver in the river of love.”

The pulse of dance and trance shines again in the darkness, accelerating and hitting our chests to revive us in the next three tracks, enveloping and healing, melting Nita’s voice into electronic magma and vice versa. First with that omnipresent longing to return to the natural origin and escape from a technological and artificial world that leaves us “metal taste” in the mouth, a “I miss the flowers” to wake up and break those “silver threads” that bind us. Skein that leads to another “Black thread”to continue the ceremony and healing in the middle of the dance floor under a storm of beats and techno beats that dilute and connect us; with Nita signing once again verses that leave a mark from beginning to end: “A knife stuck in the center of my chest, / crossing the fields that were once green and fresh… / The abyss is a hole of loneliness, / a tangle of black thread”. And if they want us alone, unconscious or asleep, they will have us in common, “Here” and now, with the longest piece and one of the brightest of an essential solo debut. Dreamy and luminous beginning that absorbs you little by little with no possible escape: “I’m moving slowly, trying to wake up, / getting off the ground, trying to levitate”. That’s what we do, detach ourselves from the earth to join it with a song that feels like a live rave and a total climax at its conclusion. Nita and Bronquio close “Magma” returning to the starting point and to what is truly important, to that “infinity where there is only love”. A “Only if you wake up.” which, in terms of sound and a first listen, reminded me of the also masterful and heartfelt Lorca epilogue of “I have three stars and twenty crosses” (23) with “And then.” They open a magical and dreamlike music box in which a classical keyboard sounds, the chirping of birds in freedom and a minimalist synthesized atmosphere that begins to extend to the spirituality of the closing celestial organ, while the song of Nita it makes its way and melts like “a ray of sunshine on a new day.”