An Actual Toddler Is Dropping an Album Recorded When It Was a Fetus

By Maria Sherman  |  February 3, 2021 | 5:05pm
EntertainmentMusic
An Actual Toddler Is Dropping an Album Recorded When It Was a Fetus
Photo:Courtesy Sacred Bones Records/Photo by Brendan Burdzinski and Kathleen Hefty

And now, for a jolt of unusual inspiration: meet Luca Yupanqui, a toddler and perhaps the youngest working musician of all time, whose first album was recorded in utero.

Wild, right? The release, appropriately titled Sounds of the Unborn, is built from sounds Yupanqui made while still in the womb. Her parents, the effortlessly cool Elizabeth Hart (Psychic Ills) and Iván Diaz Mathé (Lee “Scratch” Perry), used “biosonic MIDI technology” to capture Yupanqui’s fetal movements and translated them onto synthesizers. The couple hooked up devices to Hart’s stomach and listened, in what sounds like a beautifully meditative exercise, transcribing the vibrations Yupanqui made and turning them into songs.

According to a press release, here’s how it was done:

“Her parents… let the free-form meditations flow without much interference, just falling deeper into trance and feeling the unity. After five hour-long sessions, the shape of an album began to emerge. Elizabeth and Iván then edited and mixed the results of the sessions, respecting the sounds as they were produced, trying to intervene as little as possible, allowing Luca’s message to exist in its raw form.”

That might be the coolest and most innovative musical experiment I’ve ever heard?

And before you ask, according to The Guardian, Yupanqui really loves her music. “Her awareness of what was happening was astounding,” Yupanqui’s record label Sacred Bones confirmed. “She would open her eyes wide and stare at her parents, seemingly recognizing her own sounds from the womb, knowing that they were revisiting those rituals that made them come together as one.”

The album, Sounds of the Unborn, is out April 2. Listen to “V4.3 pt. 2″ from the release, below.

 
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