Experimental musician Lucrecia Dalt has love on her mind—the kind that quietly rearranges a life before one fully understands what’s happening. Not the polished, cinematic version, but the kind that pulls a person toward uncertainty, movement, and risk.
Sometimes, she tells 48 Hills, it’s powerful enough to send someone across oceans to see what might happen next.
“Some of the stories I have regarding love are giving myself into the impossible,” says Dalt. “It doesn’t matter if I have to move overseas if I have that intuition in my heart.”
That spirit of stepping into the unknown runs through A Danger to Ourselves, the latest album from the Colombian-born composer and sound artist. Dalt will bring the record to San Francisco this month (Sat/21 at The Lab), placing one of contemporary experimental music’s most compelling voices inside one of the city’s most adventurous venues.
Born in Pereira and now based in New Mexico, Dalt initially worked as a civil engineer in Medellín before discovering computer-based music production, a turning point that redirected her life toward sound and composition.
After living in Barcelona and Berlin, she developed a distinctive musical language blending pop structures, avant-garde electronics, and Latin American rhythmic traditions. Albums such as Anticlines (2018) and No era sólida (2020) expanded her sonic vocabulary, while her 2022 sci-fi bolero record, ¡Ay!, brought wider attention.
Alongside her recording career, Dalt has become an in-demand composer for film and TV, scoring projects including the HBO series “The Baby” (2022), the acclaimed film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024), and the psychological horror feature Rabbit Trap (2025).
Still, A Danger to Ourselves marks a shift in her creative approach. While several previous LPs leaned heavily on fictional narratives and conceptual frameworks, this record emerged from something more personal.
Much of the material began as fragments of writing—texts Dalt composed while touring behind ¡Ay! and experiencing the early stages of a new relationship.
“It just happened naturally,” she says of the shift. “I was writing to someone I was falling in love with, so it became more straightforward.”
Even so, the album never abandons abstraction entirely. Dalt still filters emotional experience through poetic imagery and moments of surrealism, describing love as improbable and mysterious—an emotional force that feels miraculous, precisely because of its unpredictability.
“Because it is,” says Dalt with a quiet laugh. “It’s a miracle.”
The songs, unfolding through layered beats, fluid electronics, and shifting vocal textures, reflect that complexity. Rather than following traditional melodic structures, the compositions often grow out of rhythm and atmosphere.
“A lot of tracks emerged from drum patterns that [percussionist] Alex Lázaro created,” she says. “Songs were emerging from those implied tonal decisions.”
That rhythmic emphasis traces back to Dalt’s musical upbringing in Colombia, immersed in traditional genres like cumbia and currulao. “You already find the melodic ideas embedded in the drums,” says Dalt.
After years of living between Colombia, Europe, and the US, she has made linguistic flexibility part of her creative instinct. This is most evident in how fluidly she moves between Spanish and English throughout the album.
“Sometimes I’m not completely conscious of which language I’m thinking in,” says Dalt. “Forms of love and communication have developed in English, too.”
Another key collaborator on the record is David Sylvian, the former frontman of the influential New Wave band Japan, who has spent decades exploring the intersection of pop, ambient music, and experimental composition. Dalt initially contacted him simply to share her music and express admiration for his work.
The connection gradually evolved into a deeper collaboration. Sylvian became closely involved in the record, contributing to production and mixing while helping shape the balance.
“His touch is absolutely fundamental to how the album came to be,” Dalt says.
Working with Sylvian also introduced her to a different creative philosophy. While she often shares demos with collaborators early in the process, Sylvian prefers to work privately until a piece feels complete.
“When he arrives at something, he just says, ‘This is it,’” says Dalt. “I learned a lot from that certainty.”
The LP’s title captures the emotional contradiction at its center. Love, in Dalt’s view, is both exhilarating and destabilizing, capable of producing profound joy while also threatening emotional equilibrium.
“It’s the best form of dopamine,” she says plainly, and learning how to navigate that intensity remains an ongoing process for the composer.
“There’s an implied danger,” says Dalt. “And also, how do I embrace that danger without burning myself too much?”
Those tensions translate powerfully to the stage. Over the years, Dalt has performed in environments ranging from galleries and experimental venues to traditional concert spaces, remaining keenly aware of how architecture and audience shape a performance’s energy.
“Some places carry a certain energy,” she says. “Your body moves toward something more intense.”
The Lab, where she’ll perform in SF, is exactly the kind of space where that intensity can flourish. Known for presenting boundary-pushing artists across music, performance, and visual art, the venue attracts audiences ready for experimentation.
“The songs allow for that freedom,” says Dalt.
San Francisco also carries personal echoes for her. At one point, her sister lived in the city, and brief visits left impressions that still linger. But what she remembers most vividly about touring isn’t geography so much as the strange magic of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly finding herself inside a temporary community.
“It’s like you’ve landed somewhere alien,” she says. “And suddenly all these people are there. How lucky are we that we are landing at the core of this vibration of interest of people?”
In the coming months, Dalt will spend plenty of time inside that traveling rhythm. A lengthy European tour awaits—27 dates, the longest continuous run of shows she’s ever undertaken.
Even as she prepares for months on the road, new musical ideas are already surfacing. Like much of her work, the next project is still forming in fragments.
“I’m starting to work on new ideas,” she says. “But it’s too early to tell.”
For an artist whose career has unfolded through instinct, experimentation, and a willingness to follow unexpected paths, that uncertainty feels less like hesitation than possibility.
And if A Danger to Ourselves proves anything, it’s that the most compelling music often begins exactly there.
LUCRECIA DALT + MARIELLE JAKOBSONS Sat/21. The Lab, SF. Tickets and more info here.
