Hüma Utku’s Dracones begins by locating its listeners in deep space, or perhaps deep waters: we are floating, drifting, surrounded by otherworldly drones and echoes. We hear cosmic resonances–alien life or whalesong?–that morph from hums to howls to cries and back over layers of vibrational haze. Voices are distorted, cello strings groan, and an electromagnetic lyre (Mihalis Shammas’s lyraei) shrieks. The life that rises from this futurist strangeness is pure and primeval.
“A World Between Worlds” explores unknowns within as much as without. It sets a distinct tone for Utku’s experiments across the album: they are poignant in their abstractness, and the ways she works with her various implements and production effects allow her to express otherwise inarticulable emotions.
Informing Utku’s sound art on Dracones is, first and foremost, her experience going through pregnancy. Sonic manifestations of this abound. Laced through several tracks are the sounds of ultrasound imaging, the raw rush of a fetal heartbeat invigorating the album starting at its halfway mark on “Here Be Dragons”.
It pulses through a bed of industrial static; in its wake comes Utku’s spectral voice and straining cello. It’s not easy to make out all the words she rasps, though some stand out: the past, a body, think, feel, “are you prepared?” She might be whispering them to herself as an expectant mother or to the being growing in her womb; perhaps that child is echoing them, somehow, back to her. These are compositions that don’t feel bound by linear directionality.
That’s true throughout. Tracks on Dracones often seem to begin in medias res, aural blasts already in progress. Utku tends toward cycles, zigzags, and amorphous mists as her foundational shapes. These, too, are part of the affective constellation surrounding Utku’s journey to motherhood. They are sounds of anxiety and unknowing (the modulations that structure “Comfort of the Shadows” burn white-hot), of the worries she has of repeating mistakes of the past (“A Familial Curse” lasts over 11 minutes and features electronic wails and driven beats), of the weighty responsibilities of creating life (as in the heavy low end of “Care in Consume”).
Unsurprisingly, there is no solid resolution in the closing track “Ayaz’a”. Instead, there is a soft acceptance of chaos, a gradient of gentler cries in string and synth form. Love and fear are inextricable in person-to-person care, and Utku moves forward burdened with this knowledge and blessed by the opportunity.
Title Dracones comes from the Latin phrase hic sunt dracones, a reference to the mythical beasts drawn on old maps to represent the unknown and its potential for danger. The terrain connecting mind, heart, womb, and world is challenging to chart, no matter how many times it’s traveled in different times and spaces.
Hüma Utku has done something remarkable in tracing her own such journey on Dracones. It’s innovative for the unpredictability of its sounds and the honesty with which she mediates such a deeply felt period of her life. It’s not for the incurious. Dracones embraces the shadows and the dissonance and is gripping for it.