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Music

Ricarda Cometa's 'Soltá el Bambú' Is a Rhythmic Noise Rock Explosion

The Peruvian-Argentine duo’s new track is built on a stark contrast between noise rock, improvisation, and pure rhythm.
Meredith Balkus
translated by Meredith Balkus
Brooklyn, US
Photo courtesy of Ricarda Cometa

A version of this article originally appeared on Noisey en Español. Leer en Español .

Ricarda Cometa travels with a jar of C4 and a pair of wire cutters—at least metaphorically speaking, as nothing seems to stop them when they want to bring their explosive music live to places such as Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia or Mexico—the latter surely being the place that inspired them to name jams like “Echando Unos Taquitos” (in English, the slang equivalent of “I’m Just Here, Eating Some Tacos”) and “Chapulines.”

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Ricarda Cometa started out as a trio, but they’ve been a duo since 2017. And it’s not as if Tatiana Heuman and Jorge Espinal need another set of hands to complete their signature sound, which is based on an entirely original blend of dissonance, improvisation, muscle, brains, and above all, rhythm—that phenomenal cadence that generic noise rock generally lacks and which goes much further than mere repetition of beats and noise patterns. Ricarda Cometa has it, and it’s damn good.

When asked about the band’s transition from a trio to a duo, Espinal said:

2017 was quite intense, as we had to restructure ourselves as a band. Moving from being a trio to a duo meant that the work dynamics and our approach to making music changed a bit. In a trio, if one of the members isn’t at their best, there’s support in the other two legs of the band. But in duo that makes improvised music, you always need to be on point.

He added that Ricarda Cometa 2—which has a killer track list and psychedelic cover—is a record that:

…was recorded after a tour of 16 shows in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Balkans [Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia], so we were already pretty warmed up. We recorded the album in two sessions without any real framework apart from the duration of the improvisations and some key words, which referred to some type of rhythm of indication for certain instruments. ‘Soltá el Bambú’, [for example], maintains that rhythmic expression that [we] like so much. It tries to be very attuned to the decisions of each instrument in order to break down the structure of the track until it finally becomes a song.

Ricarda Cometa 2 will be released on June 1, 2018 on Nefarious Industries, but you can listen to the premiere of their first track “Soltá el Bambú” (“Let Go of the Bamboo”) exclusively on Noisey below.

To learn more about Ricarda Cometa, visit their Bandcamp.