Maria Usbeck wrote her second album in response to finding her first grey hairs. If her 2016 debut Amparo was a study in place, Envejeciendo is a study in time, examining aging as a continuum of death and regeneration with a light, whimsical touch. On Amparo, the former Selebrities singer returned to her native Ecuador (and a number of other places over three years of travel) to sing in Spanish and indigenous languages including Quichua, Rapa Nui, and Bribri. She pieced together ambient recordings from three years of travel, new-wave production, and instruments like the Andean quena flute, harp, and tumba drum to recover a native language.
On Envejeciendo, Usbeck uses these same tools to cultivate a richer emotional terrain. She treats the concept of aging as if it had no endpoint, observing the process in real time. Each sound bleeds into the next. On “Obscuro Obituario,” it’s a layering of human sighs that gives way to a haunting refrain in the voice of one losing their memory: “Recuerda que yo te puedo ver” (“Remember that I can see you”).
The examinations of aging on Envejeciendo run the spectrum from heartbreaking to ascetic. On “Amor Anciano,” a forest of synths breaks into an interlude of wind instruments and crickets as Usbeck’s grandmother recalls a bygone romance: “Le queda a una el recuerdo, el recuerdo lindo, de esos años preciosos de la ilusión….” she trails off. (“One is left with the memory, the beautiful memory, of those precious years of infatuation.”) “Retirement Home” imagines the fun retirement homes of the future, and “Secret in Japan” ponders the traditional laundry list of a healthy life: eating well, exercising, getting enough rest. “I think the secret to our longevity is….” Usbeck begins, naming several of these items before finally admitting: “I actually don’t know.”
Most of the album is similarly detached, with a lyrical economy that allows for a variety of readings. It opens with “Adios a Mi Memoria,” a goodbye to memory as blithe as a wave from a passing ship. The five-line song moves from Spanish to simple English, the voice of a bilingual brain no longer policing the language of its thought.
Usbeck also uses the mundane—like the dissociation that comes with learning a new technology—to encapsulate more existential displacement. On “The Machine,” she speaks as an elder learning to use a computer, the voice chopped and stretched as if downloaded over a bad connection. Pulsing synths and heavy reverb recall the aesthetics of the primitive internet, juxtaposed with the disembodied voice of a virtual assistant explaining artificial intelligence—the past and the future meeting in a conflicted present.
Usbeck’s quiet can inspire moods that range from casual observation to painful flashback. The album seems meant as exactly that: a slip in self-consciousness brought on, as Usbeck explains on the final track, by the active and passive mind: “Será que es nostalgia/Talvez es la vejez” (“Maybe it is nostalgia/Perhaps it is old age”). Both states cause memories to embalm and deteriorate without our permission. Yet Envejeciendo provides the distance necessary to think of aging as an old map navigated with intention. With eight concise tracks, Usbeck invites the listener into the kind of brief, dissociative fugue that lets you see all these selves at once.
