To the inhabitants of Menorca, a small Mediterranean island with a heavily agrarian identity, the parenòstic, or farmers’ almanac, dispenses ancient wisdom with a sprig of oracular foresight. Its pages offer a compendium of long-range weather forecasts, phases of the moon, guidance on when to plant and when to prune—when, even, to slaughter pigs, chop firewood, or cut hair. Its history reaches back to at least the 17th century, but in modern times, the dog-eared text has been updated to encompass saints’ days, hunting seasons, recipes, horoscopes, poems, and advertisements for local businesses. The word parenòstic—a portmanteau that fuses parenostre (“our father,” i.e. He who art in Heaven) with pronòstic, a Catalan word for “prognosis” or “prediction”—appears to be used principally in the Balearic islands. That insularity surely appealed to the Menorcan singer, songwriter, and scholar Anna Ferrer, who borrowed the term for an album in defense of the island’s folkloric traditions.
Parenòstic began as a solo performance co-produced with the heterodox flamenco musician Niño de Elche: a minimalist set piece featuring little more than Ferrer playing keyboard or guitarrón beneath stark illumination, with all emphasis on her repertoire and her stunning voice. The album maintains the show’s unadorned feel and intimate mood. Ferrer’s songs are heavily rooted in local tradition: Some come from religious festivals, others were passed down by generations of farmers working in their fields. Some can be heard in everyday island life even today, while others she discovered while digging through dusty archives.
Most are sung in Menorquí, the local language, kin to Catalan, though a few are in Spanish. (One song, “Son tus ojos dos puñales,” interpolates a stanza from “La Llorona,” a song made famous by the iconic Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, with a local folk melody, illustrating the cross-pollination to which even the most deeply rooted traditions are susceptible.) But even listeners with no grounding in Balearic idioms or culture may be captivated by the eerie beauty of these intensely focused performances. Ferrer needs nothing more than her subtle, smoky voice and a single instrument—sometimes not even that; the liturgical “Heu” is sung a cappella, fleshed out with multi-tracking and cathedral reverb—to hold her audience rapt.
The album begins by cracking open a time capsule: An eerie melody sung by what sounds like an old woman strains through vinyl distortion, as though arriving from a great distance. In a way, it has: The song, “Deixem lo dol” (which means something like “let us not mourn”) is a relic of local Holy Week traditions; the archival recording was made years ago by a woman in Saint Augustine, Florida, where a contingent of Menorcans arrived in the late 1700s. Immediately it becomes clear that Ferrer wants to bring this music forward in time: As she braids her own voice with the spooky crackle of the recording, she is accompanied by a plucky synth arpeggio. The result is part Alan Lomax, part Wendy Carlos.
A careful blend of simplicity and pathos gives the album its power. In “Malanat,” drawn from two field songs she turned up in her archival research, Ferrer sings of aching backs and crops going to seed, tracing an ancient-sounding melody over a subdued organ drone. If it sounds like a song of mourning, that’s because it is: She has described the song as an homage to the island’s rural traditions, traditions that are rapidly disappearing—fields once shimmering with wheat have become plots for summer homes and swimming pools.
Ferrer is part of a wave of Spanish musicians intent on interrogating regional folk traditions, along with artists like de Elche, Tarta Relena, Maria Arnal i Marcel Bages, and even Rosalía, who got her start as a maverick flamenco singer. For Ferrer, that means responding to the reality of the present moment. One of a few original compositions on the album, although set to a traditional melody, “Glosa a Menorca” sounds almost like ambient folk, with fingerpicked guitarrón dissolving into an airy mist. Ferrer’s lyrics, however, are pointed: She sings of dying fish, drying aquifers, and young people forced out by a rapacious real estate market. It is a song of fierce—and fiercely protective—love.
Her passion also comes through in the wildness of the album’s highlights, which sound as gnarled and weatherbeaten as Menorca’s native ullastre, a species of wild olive tree. In “Voldria lo que voldria,” she intones a darkly hypnotic melody over a ritualistic drumbeat, while yelps and ululations enfold her—a snapshot, perhaps, of the anarchic ecstasy that characterizes the annual celebrations of the island’s small towns. The closing “M’agrada s’espigolar” takes that livewire energy and turns it ethereal. This is another field song; it consists of a single repeated stanza: “M’agrada s’espigolar/I es nar replegant espigues/Per tenir un tros de pa/Per menjar amb un plat de figues” (“I love to go reaping/And gathering wheat/To have a piece of bread/To eat with a plate of figs”). The refrain is sung first by Pilar Pons, a celebrated local folksinger; then, with every loop, Ferrer adds another multitracked harmony. Gradually, what begins as a song about cyclical patterns and simple pleasures builds into a chorus of dizzying harmonic complexity. It feels charged with almost supernatural force, like a hall of mirrors reflecting back on the untold generations and countless harvests that gave the song its timeless shape.
