Sega Bodega
For Sega Bodega, the veil between worlds is thin. On his third record, Dennis, consciousness and oblivion, dreams and reality, bleed into one.
Salvador Navarrete has always created space for things to exist in curious friction. The release of his 2020 debut album Salvador and its successor, Romeo, introduced a reinvention of dance music driven by a kind of dream-logic which addled the mind but made sense to the body. Even when he stretches synths to their gleaming extremes, striving toward a vision of a future we haven’t caught up with, his voice is still tender and undefined like the outline of a memory.
Navarrete’s ambitions aren’t easily contained. His irreplicable sound has been woven into the production of pop disruptors including Eartheater, Caroline Polachek and Shygirl, on her Mercury Prize-nominated record Nymph. Alongside co-founding the underground music collective NUXXE and contributing production to Björk and Rosalía’s collaborative single “Oral”, he has also formed the project Kiss Facility with Emirati-Egyptian artist Mayah Alkhateri – yet another avenue of his expression. In his career, he has known lifetimes; the challenge he rises to for his third album is to contain a lifetime to a single night and day.
Dennis arrived following an experience of mania. During a turbulent time in his personal life, the toll it took manifested itself in spikes of euphoria, sleepless nights and surrender to impulse. The difference between ‘reality’ and this mind-altered state felt paper-thin. “The intention with this album was to create a feeling of being as disorientated as I was for the past couple of years,” he shares. The experience made Navarrete interrogate what we believe to be ‘reality’: “With AI and technology moving as fast as it is, I can imagine the possibility of making ‘worlds’ with ‘people’ inside who don’t know they’re not real. Who’s to say that I’m not already one of them?”
Dennis explores the experience of a day in which you can’t be sure you woke up at all. Each song blends into the next as you sink deeper into REM sleep. Even in slumber, your brain is animated by the synaptic sparks between nerve cells that mimic wakefulness. Breathing becomes fast and irregular. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. Your eyes move rapidly behind closed lids. You dream. Dennis is a translation of how this feels.
Sega Bodega’s records have always lent themselves to introspective listening as easily as they fill dancefloors, but with Dennis, the intention is to go harder: this is a club record to lose yourself in. “Adulter8” begins with the tinker of an 8-bit alarm clock before spiriting you away into a dazzling, drop-heavy floor filler; voices emerge into the light before receding back into the dark they came from. And “Elk Skin”, which calls on vocalist Cecile Believe, is a dislocating blend of euphoric highs, Mediterranean guitar rhythms and subterranean chanting. The editing of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), disorientating and abruptly shifting, influenced the sonic whiplash of this album.
These dance hits, lurching from deep within the uncanny valley, were made with the world watching. Almost half of Dennis was brought into being on a livestream before a Twitch audience: in an act of parasocial voyeurism, anonymous numbers would gather to watch Navarrete open up Logic, begin with a blank slate, and by the end of it, hear a Sega Bodega track be born. Those club-centric tunes have an intrinsic quality of performance, to entertain and elicit reaction.
Breaking through the swirl of voices on this record are lucid moments of nonsense narrated by Miranda July, the actor, director and screenwriter behind his favourite film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). She reads snippets of gibberish that Navarrete’s friend would babble in his sleep as if they were Lynchian riddles (“My water bottle is bird transition”).
Even though he insists that his own abstract lyrics and storytelling follow the same scrambled logic, parts of himself can’t help but emerge. “Set Me Free I’m An Animal” is a warped reimagining of folk music; monastic vocals take on an unsettling quality that brushes shoulders with horror. He began writing from the perspective of a dog who wanted to run away, but on reflection, it started to morph into a wider statement of wanting to abandon a relationship when the desire to leave isn’t well-understood.
Other tracks orbit around a defining image. “Deer Teeth” was inspired by a 7000-year-old Mesolithic burial of a woman and her baby who had died in childbirth in Vedbæk, Denmark. They were found with 200 deer teeth; the baby was cradled in the wing of a swan. This trance-like track, calling on the voice of Kiss Facility counterpart Mayah Alkhateri, twists sweet melodies into something with an unsettling, metallic flavour. It’s both of the future and yet, at the same time, recalls something far more primordial.
Navarrete also embraces the Chilean element of his Irish dual heritage. For other artists, including his production for Caroline Polachek’s “Sunset”, he lavished the track with a warm Mediterranean guitar and punctuating handclaps, and on Dennis, he draws on those influences this time for himself. The track “Tears and Sighs” is a reclamation of these rhythms filtered through a nocturnal lens: the wind-up trance drop crests into inky acoustic guitars.
If the introduction, “Coma Dennis”, is a simulation of a fractured night’s sleep, then the final track, “Coma Salv”, is a perfect one. Brushing shoulders with the gentle divinity that has come to become Sega Bodega’s signature, it’s the sound of being content to let go. As it descends through five key changes, it mimics the phases of sleep: “You just sink a bit, lower and lower, and you know that in three minutes, you’ll be gone.”