The second release of Michael Mayer’s IMARA imprint – the self-titled debut by Juliana Mart?nez, recording as Servicio al Cliente – is exactly the kind of unexpected and quixotic experience you’d want from a label run by a core member of the Kompakt family. In its six gorgeous songs, Mart?nez teases out both joy and melancholy, her sweet pop melodies set against a backdrop of intimate, gentle, yet beautifully brave arrangements for beats and electronics.
Now based in Berlin, Mart?nez grew up in Colombia, the daughter of a Colombian mother and Uruguayan father, both psychiatric doctors, from whom she learned a thing or two about the joys of creativity: “My mother especially believed music had no boundaries in what it can do for your brain and soul. Like sort of what sport does to your body.” Mart?nez attended an all-girl Catholic school, but she also took private music lessons, from which she was expelled “since I composed melodies instead of rehearsing.” In retrospect, this experience reads like a sign of things to come.
After studying law at university, including postgraduate studies in Spain, Mart?nez decided to change things up: she’d already been playing in a group called Las Palabras Correctas (The Right Words), and eventually found herself embedded in a community of friendship with other artists who “always made songs and art and shared with each other in what we called the ‘Ambassadors of Colombian Music,’ a name taken from a popular Colombian TV show. These friends kept me involved and interested in my keyboards and songs.”
The lovely songs on Servicio al Cliente came to Michael Mayer via an unsolicited demo – “there was no Soundcloud or Dropbox link,” he recalls, “but a beautifully designed website containing an mp3 player. The slightly surreal artwork in combination with Servicio al Cliente’s heartwarming, somehow naive music instantly broke my heart.” There is indeed something deeply moving about these songs, possessed as they are of an uncanny charm, full of ticking rhythm patterns, levitating organ drones and gentle, luscious keyboard patterns. Above it all, Mart?nez’s voice sails through the air, her delightful Sprechstimme filled with offhand confidence. “It sounds like something that I’ve always known,” Mayer marvels, “like an old forgotten friend or a childhood memory that pops up in a dream.”
Servicio al Cliente reaches us fully formed, the complexities of Colombian life etched deep within its DNA. Its surface sweetness, the sensual sashay and sway of melodies like “La mujer que bail? con el diablo” or the opening “Rom?ntico”, betrays a deeper sense of longing that inhabits the songs’ folds, evidence of Mart?nez’s sharp, smart awareness of the work of memory, a kind of happy-sad splendor. “I feel my music is full of a South American nostalgia,” she agrees, “and is a try to recall a wider understanding of reality which Colombia forces you to have. A bittersweet irony where most things are simply possible. I try (for) my music to sound like this feeling.” And indeed, it was in a moment of great loss and sadness that Mart?nez decided to share her music: “It was only when my father passed away that I pushed myself to write to Michael with my songs.”
“And Michael replied back.”
