Ariel Zetina grew up in North Florida, where the Atlantic Ocean was a short drive away. After studying theater at Northwestern University, she moved to Chicago, finding a home in the city’s vibrant performance art and electronic music scenes. And though Lake Michigan is so vast that at times it can feel like an ocean, at the end of the day, there isn’t a tide. There is no movement of the water along Chicago’s coast, not in any daily, measureable sense. But Organism, Zetina’s new EP, is in constant motion: Vocal samples loop and twist around themselves; shuffling beats adeptly bridge the genres and cultures from which she culls her rhythms. For Zetina, the sea pulses and flows through her work, at once a muse and a beacon.
Perhaps appropriately, then, “I Miss the Sea” comes closest to tracing some kind of musical lineage for Zetina: the sparse brukdown rhythms, an homage to her Belizean heritage; the warm, thumping beat of house music from her adopted hometown; the breezy, new-age vocals from trance music, an early obsession. If you were to drop into the middle of the track, the mix of pan flutes, acid house, and spoken-word affirmations might seem jarring. But with an elegance that testifies to her experience as a DJ, each element builds in sequence, making room for the next—the brukdown beat drops out to leave room for the flutes, the flutes for the incantations, the incantations for the acid house—as if her influences were in conversation with each other.
While each of these four tracks is certainly danceable, there’s a sense that they could be taken off the shelf and inspected like sound collage. “Putamaria” is accented by what sounds like knives being sharpened; “I Miss the Sea,” in which the singer breathily pines for the ocean, has an eerie dissonance, like an Enya cover dropped into a kinetic house party.
As a member of the art collective Witch Hazel, Zetina blended her theater experience with her skills as a producer, releasing the Godzilla EP in 2015 with Chicago drag queens Imp Queen and Deven Casey. Where that record used spoken-word recitations, ambient soundscapes, and house music to satirize materialism and traditional notions of beauty, Zetina’s references on Organism are more personal, more abstract, and with more room for interpretation.
Opener “Establish Yourself in My Body” features a striking vocal sample, which Zetina introduces carefully. First, it’s “body,” a word so commonplace in dance music it hits like a kick drum. Finally, after an infectious acid line builds and takes hold of the beat, the entire song cuts out, leaving room for the entirety of the phrase: “Establish yourself in my body!” It’s a demand, a desire, a moment of corporal confusion, commanded with such confidence that you want to figure out the Derridean task of establishing oneself in the body of an other. On “Putamaria,” she samples a chorus of catcallers, who repeat the title phrase with slightly different emphases each time, each iteration further abstracting its context and turning a leering phrase into just another part of the beat.
On the closing track, “Water Nymph,” Zetina finally steps out from behind the DJ booth. The song begins with the warmth of steel drums and vocal samples of bubbly laughter but soon grows quiet, as a pitched-down Zetina sings for the first time on the record: “I wish I could be your nymphomaniac, but I’m just a water nymph.” It’s a twist on the usual virgin/whore double standards, played out at sea, the Auto-Tune rendering her singing wobbly and aqueous. After a pregnant pause, the song starts back up again in earnest, the steel drums replaced by squelching synthesizers. It’s as if Zetina wants to ensure that, even in the sticky heat of a peak-time dance floor, she can still take up all the space she deserves.
