Tarta Relena

With little more than their voices and a resolutely contemporary approach to oral repertoires hundreds of years old, Marta Torrella and Helena Ros revisit the most remote corners of Mediterranean musical tradition. The two singers embrace a living, changing perspective on folklore, reshaping it with the help of modern instruments to draw out new meanings, but never denying their origins.

Tarta Relena perform songs from ancient Crete, Corsica, Mallorca and Menorca, recounting the epics of powerful figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, the Virgin Mary and the women of the Paixu tribe in Afghanistan, against a backdrop of subtle electronic pulses and ripples. The two singers sing in Spanish, Catalan, Greek, Latin, English and even Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish language of Sephardic origin.

Experimentation is the core of their identity, and the blend of vocal techniques is their creative engine. In the arrangements, the two very different timbres live together with the synthetic sounds and electronic samples.