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Maraca

by Becky Becky

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  • Becky Becky’s long awaited 2nd album Maraca will be released by Woodland Recordings over the summer holidays.
    It’s available as a series of 5 postcards with download codes & a SPECIAL EDITION book / CD:

    Order the SPECIAL EDITION album and receive:

    25th June - Hey, Santiago! - single (postcard + download)
    9th July - The Mountain - EP (postcard + download)
    6th August - The Dance - EP (postcard + download)
    3rd September- Symmetry - EP (postcard + download)

    Late September - Maraca - album (SPECIAL EDITION book / CD + postcard + download)

    Postcard art: Brigitte Rose
    Lino cuts: Lunar Fields Design
    ... more
    ships out within 5 days
    edition of 17 

      £25 GBP or more 

    You own this  

     

  • Becky Becky’s long awaited 2nd album Maraca will be released on Woodland Recordings over the summer holidays.
    It’s available as a series of 5 postcards with download codes:

    Subscribe to the postcards and receive:

    25th June - Hey, Santiago! - single
    9th July - The Mountain - EP
    6th August - The Dance - EP
    3rd September - Symmetry - EP
    Late September - Maraca - album


    A Special Edition Book / CD of Maraca is also available to pre-order from our website.


    Art: Brigitte Rose
    ... more
    ships out within 5 days

      £15 GBP or more 

    You own this  

     

  • Digital Album
    Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      £12 GBP  or more

    You own this

     

1.
Hey, Santiago! I see both of our faces in the water. I'm reflected here beside him at the bottom of the well and I wonder: is it me now belonging here? Is her face impressed upon the water? We only opened the hatch very briefly. Late morning, winter sun flashing behind two heads soft with the knowing... I hear the chickens still, picking up the corn behind me. For a second, we are at the bottom of a well. A pinhole snapshot pressed into the blood of the land that has been calling me. I never said it was easy.
2.
The Mountain 05:41
This room has become my sanctuary. I don't know what to make of this city. Its tongue is fat against my ear, its streets incoherent and unclear. Will we only ever make love in rooms like this? Designed for refugee lovers and tired tourists. Tugged apart by those waiting at home - or at least waiting for you in your home. I spend hours gazing at the mountain, trying to take its impression within. I can feel it as he uncurls in sleep. I can feel it easing into me. In the morning when he leans over me, it is the mountain I feel entering me: osmosis of form, mountain as man, man as mountain, mountain as man, felling me, methodically, systematically, silently.
3.
I part my legs. The leather between them is soft and warmed with sunlight. I watched a film about love across distance on my long return flight. The young lead was a bull rider. The pilot says we're in for a bumpy ride. I hope this bull is a gentle one. I clench the saddle with my thighs. I grip with my thighs. I feel the softness of the flesh that young girls seek to diminish. I part my legs. I feel your tremble and your roar and my womb answers "yes". I can weather the storm. I part my legs. Ride the bronco! Shake with the mountains! Meet unknown gods! Touch the skin! I tire of the gods I know. Shake with the mountains! Ride the bronco!
4.
I am here. I have come. So go creep about the roots of pomegranate trees on mountains. Feed me up into their fruits. You are more beautiful than anything I could have imagined and you are everything I've tried to imagine. Here I stand: you before me as if it were nothing, as if there'd been no need for my suffering. My heart full with the growing, my arms sore from the rowing, two heads soft with the knowing that we are in love. And it's as if every pomegranate, walnut, lemon or fresh egg had only ever been a facsimile clue, a series of arrows, pointing away from the world that I lived in mute, tongue-tied and confused. And I can see my house, low and yellow, the garden crackling with life. Here I stand as if it were nothing, as if I'd always been your wife. My face hot with the glowing, my arms sore from the rowing, my heart full with the knowing that I belong here at the bottom of the well, feeding upwards into the fruit, coursing under the mountain, seeking deep into the roots of the grove.
5.
Cock & Hen 04:33
Daughter, I am your father and I have always been your father. Daughter, child, I am your father, but what am I too? I am your lover. For I am the cock and you are the hen and we only have these two roles to play and we only have these steps I must teach you. The dance says all we need to say. And I have provided for you and I shall continue to provide for you long after you become a mother yourself. Choose a mate, in sickness, in health. He'll be the cock and you'll be the hen and you'll only have these two roles to play. You only have these steps I must teach you. The dance says all you'll need to say. Show the sun you appreciate his light! Show the land you appreciate his might! Let us dance! Daughter, spin for me! Show your father you can receive by giving.
6.
m a r a c a 04:07
His face fascinates me, mischievous yet kind, but with a softness I hadn't expected to find. His soft eyes are soft lashed, his soft fingers softly holding mass. Soft body, soft eyes, soft hands - but the tongue, as rough as sand, a pebble pushed into my mouth, a peppermint from a million miles south. Single letters spelling out a single word, a message from the other side of the world: m a r a c a maraca This is enough to take me away. That she could know is insane. As insane as chirruping cicadas, as insane as hissing maracas. Maracas humming like a rash. Is this espionage or witchcraft? How could she possibly know? A message from the other side of the world. Single letters spelling out a single world. Maracas wound up too tight and crackling. Bone and droppings inside a taut skin. All is still now. He says, I know this number. It is my wife. He has a wife.
7.
Coffee 04:36
I wonder? Did he feel something too, the other one? Did something in him know? They told me he pounded a frantic salsa beat into an amp unprovoked. Did flares shoot from our convulsing abdomens and touch them at the very same moment? He, in a basement bar below a station and she across the globe and waiting, black hair damp with sweat, the kids at school, mother in an adjacent room, coffee pot hissing ignored. She's licking her lips, waiting, waiting. It will be soon. The maracas are beginning to play. He's moving his hips cooing as a dove. The moment she's been waiting for, for a lifetime, since before they fell in love, when a boy at school curled shouted insults that she had a moustache. Pear blossom was falling. The sun was high and other girls laughed. She had a graze on her knee that prickled with the salt of the sweat. Other girls laughed and now she knew: all men would be bastards and all girls coquettes; jiggling, giggling maracas. And now the coffee pot is erupting onto the stove top and he is erupting into the embrace of a braceleted figure with a soft-focus face.
8.
Condor 00:48
Condor.
9.
The Dance 05:46
You're asking me to dance, but I don't know how to answer. You're asking me to say no, to say that I'm no dancer. But we came here to dance. I flew here to dance with you. More than anything, anything, I want to dance with you. You flirted with me. You wanted to show me your culture, your spirit, your music, the dance to dance with me. I'm wearing my sandals. I've dressed carefully. I've made myself elegant, wearing the beads that you gave me. Echoing footsteps left over from the exotic dancers ending their show, a salsa is playing and I have been practising salsa at home, willing myself forward into the moment when you will take my hand and lead me from the table to the floor in front of the band. Adrenaline and fear will flood me and my cheeks will flush and in my neck keeping the beat, I will feel my pulse. You'll smile and step with the music and I'll follow you. And you'll be happy that I'm answering, happy I came to see you. Dance! Dance! Dance! Bailame! Bailamos! Dance! Dance! Dance! Love! Love! Love! But now you're mouthing words to songs I'll never know, bobbing your head side to side, raising an eyebrow. But I can see the weariness that you keep underneath. You don't have it in you to bother with me. You'll remember this evening as when we did something fun but then I just sat there, sad and silent and sullen. You in your smart jacket and me just sat in my seat, a half pineapple and melted ice cream that I just couldn't eat.
10.
Fruit 03:08
In the rain in the airport car park, steam rising from the concrete floor, I cried to my sister for half an hour, my voice choked and small. I finished the fruit he'd left. I rarely eat fruit. Then again, I rarely wear things on my wrists or fuck in the afternoon. I rarely eat galettes of French chocolate, naked in bed and rarely do I smoke but I lit up a thin, menthol cigarette. I open all the windows. Let some new air in. Everything is new now. I think I love him.
11.
Spider 04:27
Outside my window, a spider ricochets in the wind and as she swings, she spins, and as she spins she sings. The strings she spins are strings of a harp, playing a cueca, a tarantella in F sharp. You are once more a family man in the family home, back in bed with her like honey in honeycomb. Just to appease the children - is that right? But would it be so hard for her to seduce you in the night? She could lay a soft warm arm about the hulk of your shoulder, climb your mountain range as you slumber. Would you realise it's her skin on your skin as you dream of me entwirled amid your limbs? You and her ricochet in the wind and as you swing, she spins, and as she spins she sings. The strings she spins are the strings of a harp, playing a cueca, a tarantella in F sharp.
12.
Lepidolite 01:36
I look at it and I see proof that someone saw me. Brought back to life by a string of lavender lepidolite, light as a hollow bone, bringing me to a home I thought I'd never see. How was it so easy? If tiny lilac beads could bring me so much peace, maybe I could start talking to god after all, instead of the house plants and the walls.
13.
If I were pregnant with the beginnings of your son inside of me, the son you've been praying for, would you talk to me? If the honeycap had slipped, would you talk to me then? If I'd got my timings wrong, would you talk to me again? I don't understand why unless you think you might have a son harbouring himself in ruby velvet within a different woman. Did she beat me to it? This woman who sleeps under your roof and between your sheets but no longer beside you. If I were pregnant, would you treat me so? I am a day late, but once I let it go, I will release the cells that you left within me and like moonlight on bones, I will bleach away your memory.
14.
Symmetry 12:33
I light a fire with my souvenirs. I light a fire with all these symbols: the paper, the photos, the tickets. I'm speaking to you in smoke signals. I made love to a mountain. I let him enter me. I made love to a volcano. He quaked within me. I am shaken and shaking over the embers of my souvenirs, still feeling full of the mountain in another hemisphere. The mountain is still within me, shaking in symmetry. And when I remember this, I am no longer sad: it on the other side of the earth and I made small by its mass. I have not lost the man. The man was also the mountain. I have not lost the lover. The lover was also the mountain. The mountain is still within me, shaking in symmetry.

about

Becky Becky's second album 'Maraca'

credits

released October 8, 2021

Gemma L Williams & Peter J D Mason: words and music.
Gemma L Williams: voice on all tracks except 'Condor'; clarinets on 'Hey, Santiago!'; harp on 'Spider'.
Peter J D Mason: production on all tracks; vocals on 'La Casa Amarilla' & 'Condor'.
GRIP TIGHT: voice on 'Hey, Santiago!'.
Bearto Negro: voice on 'Cock & Hen'.
Laura Juillet: saxophone on 'Hey, Santiago!' & 'Symmetry'.
Brigitte Rose: cover art & postcard illustrations.
Lunar Fields Design: lino cuts.

Woodland Recordings WR086 2021.

Special thanks to all who helped in making this album.
Dedicated to the late, great Ally Gourlay, who always showed us love.

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Becky Becky

Literary-inspired electro-synth-pop duo Gemma L Williams & Peter J D Mason.

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