Catalina Matorral

Catalina Matorral is a comet. Catalina Matorral is a duo; Marion Cousin and Borja Flames make up its double head and four hands.

A grand, serial poem where everything is interconnected —  songs, texts, music and obsessions — in a vast, skillfully crafted cycle. It is a sound theater where androids dream of electric sheep, a spellbook where medieval illuminations sit next to printed circuit boards, where each sentence is an indecipherable secret, a Jivaro poem, an incantation to lift enchantments.

The result is both eventful and very soft:  chimeric narration, heady verses, pop fragments, horizontal synths, distorted technologies. One would think they’re listening to an opera composed by Robert Ashley or Laurie Anderson, based on an improbable libretto written by anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada, and performed by holograms of Brigitte Fontaine and Areski — who unexpectedly regurgitate bits of blunt folk, binary jazz, baroque songs and ghostly madrigals. Micro-events, great enchantments. 

Catalina Matorral invents a curiously rural science fiction that confounds poetry with white magic and puts French music in a permanent tension between the cosmos and manure.