Canada’s Maara-Louisa Dunbar has sort of experienced her rise as an underground club superstar at the speed of a DMT hit. Like DMT, the whole thing has felt much longer than it actually is. In just two years, Dunbar has mastered the craft of DJing and established a singular creative identity as a producer. Her music, shared through a bevy of singles and EPs, is fixated on queer sexuality as a sort of awakening. For the most part, Maara’s sexy psychedelia has been delivered as hard-hitting prog and trance bangers. This changes with her debut LP, The Ancient Truth. While the album continues her explorations into erotic mysticism, it sees Dunbar change course toward slow-burning, atmospheric electronica.
The Ancient Truth feels like accessing a flow state; it’s a trippy vortex that takes from psytrance, trip-hop, and acid to create an ever flowering soundscape of sweaty, orgiastic New Age electronica. There’s the Kama Sutra like ebb and flow of Surrender, or the pleasurable pain of Erotics Of Betrayl, a track that owes as much to Erotica era Madonna as it does to Underworld or Portishead. The pastiche includes moments of 90’s style downtempo and ambient, ripe with somewhat asinine samples and synth sounds that recall Windows screensavers. In the hands of Dunbar though, they could soundtrack a tantra workshop. Oh I Remember begins with a collage of bird sounds, dolphin-like psytrance synths, and orgasmic moans before melting into sensuous drum and bass, while the hilariously titled Sapphic Rehabilitation Centre opens with a computerised waterfall sample that flows into an ashtanga ready trance beat.
While Maara’s previous work has been rooted in sexuality, The Ancient Truth feels significantly less explicitly minded. Dunbar instead visits sex by way of its mystique. Here, eroticism and mysticism are one and the same, with Dunbar making a strong argument for queerness as a heightened state of spirituality. There’s something endearingly campy in the retro sense about what Dunbar creates here, a tie-dye hippy-dippiness that’s a welcome addition to Maara’s progressive trance toolkit.
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