Most of Delia Beatriz’s work since 2019’s breakthrough System EP has been experimental, anthropological, and rooted in software. First there was The Long Count, where the Mexican American producer and NYU adjunct professor, better known as Debit, used machine learning to reproduce the sounds of ancient Mayan instruments, infusing ghostly ambient with dread and a sense of wonder. Then she took on cumbia rebajada, a slowed-down subgenre of cumbia from Monterrey, and slowed it even more, using granular synthesis to create an album of equally unsettling drone. Both those records came out on Modern Love, a UK imprint known for grayscale electronic atmospheres, but with Potpourri, her latest LP, she jumps back into club music on her original label home, N.A.A.F.I., from Mexico City. Rather than overtly experimental styles or complex software processes, Potpourri focuses on the raw power of rhythm and the potential of hardware, squeezing the legendary TB-303 bass synthesizer into ugly new tones and timbres, bolstering a potent fusion of techno and guaracha.
Roland’s TB-303 is closely associated with acid house, the genre born in the mid-’80s when Phuture turned its bass tones gnarled and discordant; the machine boasts a distinctive squelch that has been appropriated by everyone from Aphex Twin to Nine Inch Nails. But here, its potential for ugly, alien tones is turned up to 11, an eerie buzz throbbing threateningly beneath the beats. Those beats are equally in flux, switching between straight-ahead techno and the funky but lead-footed stomp of guaracha, adding to the disorientation. This isn’t your typical techno LP. The tracks are short, and they shift constantly instead of looping.
Even though it’s a deliberate return to dance music, this is Debit, so there’s still a concept to go with it. The album is named both for the fragrant mix of dried flowers but also for an 18th-century musical term that describes a pulpy medley of musical motifs drawn from different sources. Beatriz, however, makes a convincing case for those disparate elements actually belonging together. She’s not the first to do incorporate guaracha in an underground dance music context—in Mexico, there’s a long tradition of tribal guarachero going back to the turn of the millennium, followed by attempts from the UK’s Untold and the U.S.’s DJ Python and Nick León—but here the genres exist in an uneasy suspension, sometimes combining before separating like oil and water.
On “Encasadelciegoeltuerco,” the guaracha triplets are slippery and psychedelic, interrupting the classic techno feel from the hi-hats and cymbals. The track holds back carefully, and when the rhythm finally drops, it seems to fall out of time and trip over itself. It’s a lot like the work of Italian techno tripper Donato Dozzy, but heavier, sometimes even belligerent.
On tracks like “Pero like” (churning, evil, trancey) or “dystrophica” (demonic and gurgling), the music approaches the sinister pulsation of psytrance, reflecting the shifting sands of both techno and guaracha. And there are more straightforward fusions, like the excellent “Tuve suerte,” which is big, dumb, broken, muscular techno with a trigger-happy synth motif that sounds a little like “Sandstorm.”
But the real pleasure is the 303 basslines that squirm in between the drums, coating the soundscapes of the tracks in grime and noxious soot. Opener ”Referencepoint” becomes increasingly caustic as it hurtles towards its end, and “Assimilation” offsets its straightforward, bossa-fied techno drum programming with some truly nasty sounds that reappear throughout the LP, like on the loose, limber guaracha fever dream of “telosico.”
Those basslines take the place of conventional melody, giving the music a dark, industrial tint, like music you might hear in a cheesy club sequence in a movie (in a good way). The unstable track structures and strange, almost organic feel of the 303 basslines make the music feel like it’s rotting from the inside out, like the whole thing could crumble at any second. It’s a flattering twist for techno, a genre that otherwise feeds off its own predictability, which is where the guaracha comes in: It adds flexibility and swing, intensified by Beatriz’s need to make things really, really weird. “The genre itself, guaracha, is already so poly and syncopated, messing with our notion of time,” she has said, which makes Potpourri something of a techno wormhole: sucking you in, chewing you up, and spitting you back out, leaving you wondering where the hell you are and how you got there.
