Xenia Xamanek announces their album ‘DELIRIO REAL’, as the first album release of their newly founded label UUMPHFF, an independent music platform and record label based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
DELIRIO REAL is an intimate album composed within the strictures of the pandemic, inspired by themes of disruption and diasporic longing, love and loss, new beginnings and non-belonging, and redemptive encounters with locating one’s essence in times of hopelessness. Xenia’s non-binary process of artistic creation is dazzling in DELIRIO REAL: blending mesmerizing sounds, hard-hitting deconstructed beats with reggaeton references and Latin American influences.
The album contains lyrics from Xenia’s deceased grandfather in ‘Embrujada’, whose recordings also appeared in their previous album ‘Envase’, blurring the boundaries between past and present until they become one.
The title for DELIRIO REAL is derived from the idea that the music exists in the liminal spaces between simulation and reality, a hallucinatory fever dream that becomes indistinguishable from a supersaturated notion of reality itself, when emotion colours and constructs your very perception of the world. The album also features abji_hypersun with whom Xenia founded UUMPHFF, and friends Varnrable and Bobby Lebona.
Xenia’s music often welcomes an unanticipated mixture of sounds, both inclusive and unapologetic in its expression. Having studied the rules of composition and being formally trained in saxophone, Xenia is appealed to ignore all rules in their idiosyncratic approach to music and splices disparate genres and textures to create surreal, transcendent soundscapes.
With DELIRIO REAL, Xenia emerges from the Danish underground scene for electronic music with a revitalizing record that defiantly transgresses and dismantles tired eurocentric homogeneities and envisions enlightened new modes of being.
credits
released November 12, 2021
All music written, produced and mixed by Xenia Xamanek
Mastered by Hari Shankar Kishore
Embrujada lyrics by Luis Felipe Lopez Alvarado
Disguised Smize lyrics and vocals by Varnrable and Xenia Xamanek
NEW SNAKE vocals by abji_hypersun
The Twenties vocals by Bobby Lebona
With support from Koda Culture.
.Press:
Metro UK:
“Xamanek creates a heady kind of avant-reggaeton that veers from neo-pop to minimalism. So unusual is this record that aventure into Björk territory is startling in its familiarity. A truly inventive album that carries you into another world.”
The Guardian:
“Danish/Honduran artist Xenia Xamanek channels the downtempo dancefloor dub of DJ Python on their latest album Delirio Real (Uumphff). An unpredictable mix of synths, drum machines and guitar-led songwriting make for an enigmatic listen.”