LP version. The 1984 soundtrack for dance-theater performance Destiada marked Pep Llopis’ debut score for avant-garde Valencian company Ananda Dansa, and initiated a creative partnership that would continue throughout the ensuing decades.

The dance is structured as a lyrical fable about the struggle between life and death as seen through the crimson-tinted lens of the Spanish bullfighting tradition. Llopis and Vicent Alonso, a fellow Spanish composer, instrumentalist, and longtime collaborator, were inspired to entangle the broad Mediterranean soul of the story with a digitally ripened perspective native to the 1980s, translating traditional musical forms from countries like Greece, Italy, and North Africa into their contemporary context, and offering “a different musical approach to the world of bullfighting - as a fact, as a dream, and as a ritual.”

An album that is meant to be understood as a totalizing whole rather than a collection of parts, Destiada is an elaborate universe of melody and timbre that’s as uncannily and elegantly composed as any dream.

Pep Llopis: ARP Odyssey, percussion, melodica, vocals, piano, piano percussion. Vicent Alonso: lute, sitar, cane flute, bouzouki, mandolin, bell, drums, plates. Recorded at Estudios Pertegas in August 1983 and February 1984.