el suave brillo solar de la mente

Foster has one of the loveliest voices in contemporary music, classically precise but full of blues-folk intonations. She can jump an octave as easily as you or I get out of bed. She can make the notes glitter with vibrato. She can sing right into your ear, even through the medium of CD or vinyl, as if she’s murmuring a message just to you.

It’s easy to get caught up in just how beautiful she sounds, as for instance in “Añil,” with its the narcotic calm, its subtle, submerged fire. Yet let’s spare a thought, too, for the songs themselves and the instrumental prowess, the Herrero half of the equation, which is very fine as well.

Herrero is Spanish guitarist who grew up near Madrid, soaking up classical and vernacular traditions and reinterpreting them for the current era. In reviewing his 2017 Portuguese guitarra album, Astrolabio, Bill Meyer noted the willingness to experiment. He wrote, “Like [Keiji] Haino he is quite willing to play a stringed instrument in ways unforeseen by anyone committed to conventional technique.”  

There’s nothing overtly tradition-defying in the seven songs Herrero curated for Foster. Indeed, the Spanish guitar flourishes in bursts of bright or moody strumming, not a surprise, but lively and fresh. The precision of the playing creates a glistening architecture, which Foster’s more fluid instrument wraps and swirls around. Both the guitar and Foster’s voice have been recorded with extreme clarity, so that you feel like you’re in the room with them, except maybe more so.

The title track, “Adormidera,” for instance, is disarmingly intimate and without pretension. Though both the playing and the singing exhibit a great deal of skill, the vibe remains casual. You can imagine the pair picking out the melody in the later hours of a party, letting it unfurl and infiltrate the air until all conversation stopped.

These songs reference the natural world, at least in their titles, with “Adormidera” named after the poppy, “Avellaneda” for a hazel grove and “Jilguero” for a small songbird. “Añil,” however, runs as blue as its Spanish-language name, with long dreamy vocal sustains that hint at stoic melancholy. And indeed, all these songs flow with the grace of water, without strain or evident effort. It’s as if they were constructed for this precise pair and this precise stage of their respective careers—which, come to think of it, they were. This is lovely music, well worth seeking out.