At4 — Silvana Estrada
COATEPEC | On "Marchita", "Abrazo", and the soft power of silence in her music
WORDS BY REBECCA DAVISON-MORA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DANE THIBEAULT
INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK
Words are sacred to Silvana Estrada. In her album Marchita — a contemporary meditation on Mexican folk music — poetry is at the forefront, resting on a carefully constructed musical landscape. The result of this combination is a symphonic soundscape wherein lyrics that speak of loneliness, love, and hope swirl with dramatic melodies that prevent them from sinking to their depths.
Despite the constant music that wafted throughout her formative years — her parents are both luthiers — the geography of rural Veracruz taught her to lean into silence. This comfortability with silence is now wielded with precision in her music. Next to the silence and the music there is also poetry, and a particularly a poetic quality to Estrada’s thinking. It’s a poetry that’s been touched variably by her cinematic influences, her love of Paris, and a fervent desire for vulnerability, among others. Loneliness — a recurrent theme within the poetics of her lyricism — is seemingly a companion to the silence. But of course, in Spanish soledad does not always mean loneliness, and silence is never really silent. It is, as Estrada describes, merely “the absence of words.”
Nowhere is this poetic spirit more evident than in her music video for “Tom’s Diner”, her cover of the Suzanne Vega classic, and her only English release. The story of feminine interior life comes alive in this music video, which presents more as a short film, capturing a mood that’s distinct from the original─and distinctly Silvana. With a painterly treatment, solo vignettes are carefully crafted. They feature Estrada winking or smiling as she enjoys her solo run of a cantina that could be found in 1920s Paris or today’s Roma neighbourhood in Mexico City. She is not melancholy in her loneliness, and when the cumbia at the end fades, we are not sad that the dancers leave or that our protagonist is left alone in the empty café. For it is solitude that she embraces, not loneliness. The joy of watching and listening to this musicality is luminous.
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