embracing bodies in folds of
dark warm woman flesh
this heaven-sent secret
odour of enchantment *
The body is a cage with which our mind both finds a home and also resists the constraints of its confines. An impossible mortal predicament: the roiling sea of thought captured within a vessel fragile yet resilient. Are our emotions destined to break like waves against this very real physical border, or can we instigate (and celebrate) liminal breach, and draw our ideas beyond this divisive frontier, and cast them among the stars?
Maud the Moth, the solo nom de plume (or should that be nom de guerre?) musical project of Spanish-born, Scottish-based composer and performer Amaya López-Carromero – also of healthyliving – has been the outlet of trembling, exorcisms of emotion before now. From The inner wastelands in 2015 to 2020’s Orphnē, the artist has continually plumbed the depths of her soul and made tears roll silently down the cheeks of those willing to engage both in bedrooms and in live lamentation. The build-up to the latter record first put López-Carromero on my radar and the beguiling collaborative album with trajedesaliva in 2023, as well as managing to catch Maud the Moth on tour a number of times during that period cemented my appreciation and awe.
When The Distaff was initially announced, I have to admit to anticipating a fantastic record. My sixth sense tingled in my toes enough to hint towards something that might be classed as “career-defining”. And while for the most part I’m a firm believer that such terminology can often be employed by a reviewer as lazy hyperbole, or, that it can only legitimately be judged as such with the benefit of hindsight, there are moments where one can feel the shift in the moment. I remember, very clearly, the two sets Kristen Hayter (then performing as Lingua Ignota) played at Roadburn 2019. It was as if those few days became a measure of time – BR and AR. Before Roadburn and After Roadburn. It feels as though The Distaff and no-doubt its initial corresponding tour (supporting Earth, no less) is that moment for Maud.
López-Carromero’s third solo full-length album continues her unique blend of dark neoclassical avantisms with a more distilled vision of how to incorporate the clear love of heavier turns of denuded, epiphanic post-metal and a soulful singer-songwriter rebellion. The Distaff plunders in its grief a sickly treasure trove of intergenerational trauma and both celebrates the female form and mourns the precarity of womanhood. A tapestry unspooling and untethered in time, with the voices, memories, and influence of those that came before indelibly infused within. Maud, the conduit for this glossolalia (or, xenoglossia, given this weaving of ancestry and chosen tongue?), performing an aural equivalent of the Voynich manuscript, unleashes this beauty and solemn ordinance upon us.
How to make sense of it? As densely layered, multi-faceted, and festooned with patina upon patina of meaning as The Distaff clearly is, it is also surely just beautiful to behold. Take away the studious arc with which I choose to delve, and this album is a triumph of divine musical majesty on display.
Amaya turns their hand towards piano and conjures that soaring classically trained operatic voice, of course, but also to psaltery, hyperpiano and percussion, while collaborators Sebastian Rochford (drums and percussion), Alison Chelsey [aka Helen Money] (cello) and Fay Guiffo (violin) all contribute with subtle but brilliantly sparing but precise playing. Perhaps no other than Amaya herself forms the sound design and musical blueprint more than Scott McLean (guitar, saxophone, and Moog), also of healthyliving, also of Ashenspire, and who recorded and mixed the LP.
If that wasn’t enough, it was finished off, by being mastered at Abbey Road Studios by Alex Wharton. In short, The Distaff is compositionally without peer so far this year and sounds sublime from front to back. The fact she chose to release it herself, on new label The Lavarium, makes perfect sense to the wider concept of what this record represents.
As birds chirp in the branches of some sun-dappled grand old tree, blue sky yawing behind as a light breeze eddies broken leaves slowly to the ground, Maud the Moth bleeds out at the roots. The body as temple; blood, as river. A feminine sacrifice experimenting in eulogy and abandon. A clarion call for the body to be unshackled, and emotion to be transcended from within: fiat lux.
touch not
the flame
of this too hot
heavy love
for it will turn
our world to ash
and make the heart
a grave *
*sections from when angels speak of love by bell hooks.
