Around five years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, Lido Pimienta received an unexpected invitation to score a piece of music for the New York Ballet.
She’d just released her third studio album, Miss Colombia, which earned her a GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY nomination. "The album did well, but you didn’t really see it. I couldn’t tour when the pandemic hit,” she tells GRAMMY.com. "There was a lot of turmoil in both my marriage and my work. So, I isolated myself in a studio, which is when I was hit up by this New York contemporary dancer, Andrea Miller.”
Lido teamed up with producer Owen Pallet to work on a piece for Miller’s play, "A Sky to Hold." She wrote the music alone, before Owen adapted the work for orchestra. The process was fascinating — and inspirational. "I thought, maybe I could just treat the orchestra as I would treat any other electronic song."
The piece would form the basis for Pimienta's latest record, La Belleza. The nine-track album was created with a 66-piece orchestra in a dramatic act of creative freedom and resistance to industry expectation. Pimienta's first album in five years is a product of a single question: Will La Belleza still be "relinquished to the world music aisle?” she wonders with a smile. "Because I’m stubborn like that."
Throughout her career, Lido Pimienta has reckoned with the labels placed on her music, which is Spanish language and guided by Afro-Colombian rhythms. "Sometimes I wish I could make music not tied to [the term] 'world music.' I just want to draw a flower — not a revolutionary flower! Just flower and is accepted as such,” she explains. "So I thought, why not write a classical album?"
Pimienta is not trained as a classical musician — La Belleza a remarkable U-turn from Miss Colombia, an industrial reggaeton record with electronic instrumentation. Quiet, stripped back, and beautifully haunting, La Belleza takes note from a wide range of inspirations: from a Czech film soundtrack to an Indigenous death ritual.
Below, in her own words, Lido Pimienta shares why she brought them all together on this fiercely original piece of work.
Czech 1970s Film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
I’ve been obsessed with this movie for the last five years. It’s from the 1970s. The instrumentation [on the score] is really unique, [composed by] Luboš Fišer, who was quite experimental for his era.
There are passages in that soundtrack that sound very modern. He was able to take this classical, Byzantine music and make it sound like a synth. That's interesting to me, and I jump off from there.
The Wayuu Song
This album is really about finding the beginning. And that, for me, is my Indigenous ancestry. Even though I grew up in [the Wayuu] matriarchal [culture], there's still a lot of music I don't know, and a lot of the language that I don't know. One of the ceremonies in Wayuu culture is called los restos, the remains. It has been done in our culture for centuries. I know that in Europe, when the Requiem Mass of the Dead was happening with Gregorian chanting, we had our own thing, called "el lloro," the cry, when female mourners gather next to the deceased and cry in unison for their transition to their soul to the beyond.
That was so interesting to me. Across cultures, music has been putting us together. For me, it's in the same vein of being a Caribbean woman making classical music, but still put it in the world music aisle because she's not European.
Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra
I work in Colombia because I don’t have to explain myself. When I bring the music to a Colombian orchestra, they understand that this is a son de vallenato, or a sexteto, or a cumbia. I don't have to over-explain myself, especially when I only have two days and no money to do it.
There's so many brilliant musicians that are giving you something that you didn't even think about yourself. That it's nice that you get those opportunities one-on-one, and that the musicians get to know you and you put more heart into the music. I didn't want it to sound like a generic classical record, and that was only gonna happen if we went to the place where it all came from.
We worked with them through something I like to call la colombianada. In Colombia, you just got to make it work. I contacted two orchestras in Colombia, and the Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra got back to me first. They're like, "We would love to play a show with you." I said "I have this music, how about if you record on my album for free, and in exchange I give you a show any day of the year, any year that you want?"\
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So we exchanged goods, and that's how I did it.
Enya
I'm very obsessed with Enya. I want to be Enya. I really aspire to be Enya. No interviews; living in a castle; taking care of my kids. Not touring! Music is too much work. But Enya figured it out. She's like, let me have my golden years, make my music over here. And then I'll emerge and I'll do a soundtrack and then I'll go back to my castle. \
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I think that's really cool. That's kind of the path that I am on. How do I continue to put a roof over my head and my children's heads without sacrificing my art? How can I make it so I can paint over here and I don't have to constantly be on tour and constantly putting my face out there. I feel like it's dangerous out there for people like me in the world, you know?
Producer Owen Pallett
The genesis of all of it was Sky to Hold, which I wrote for New York City Ballet Orchestra. When I finished the piece and I needed someone to communicate the music to the New York City Ballet orchestra, I contacted Owen. He transcribed it and helped me arrange it.\
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Later, I contacted Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, and I went [to Colombia] with Owen, who helped me orchestrate it. We were there for a week to rehearse and record it.
I wouldn’t have been able to do this without him, but we made it happen! I have vivid dreams — I wake up in the middle of the night and I message Owen or I sent him a voice note to say: "You remember that arrangement in the fourth movement? I need you to go [sings la la la]."
Then he sends me the score. And that’s how we did it.
Following Her Voice
"Mango"’ is a gorgeous, sensual song. But in essence, it’s about the feeling and joy of sticking your teeth into a ripe mango! In Canada, I can’t do that as a mango goes for $3-5! So it’s about forgiving myself for not raising my children in the Caribbean. It’s many things; about understanding — I love my family, but I am also my entity — that I love my baby daddy, but maybe we’re not going to end up living in the same house forever.
As I get older, [I question] how do I want to live? Everything I'm doing now is so that I can get to that point where I'm living in my village, under my mango tree, doing my art and having no one to bother me. It is to go through pain and enjoy that pain because you will come out triumphant in the end if you follow your own voice. It's kind of what this album is about. That's what's sublime about it.