Tell Me Más: Lúconde Fuses Theater and Urbano in Her Debut Album

Many popular musicians have created fictional alter egos as a way to explore new sonic avenues that they wish to experiment with. David Bowie had Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, David Johansen had Buster Poindexter, Lady Gaga spent a whole season as Jo Calderone, and the less said about Garth Brooks's Chris Gaines era the better, but it certainly happened. For them, it's a kind of performance art - an expression of their interest in stepping out of their comfort zone and giving the endeavor a theatrical flair as well. The debate about whether these could be considered merely publicity stunts is valid, but for some artists, there's a true creative desire to inhabit these personas. For Adriana Rivera, a Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, it's a culmination of her dream to merge two artistic outputs that have long fascinated and inspired her: music and acting. From this desire and its manifestation, Rivera set herself aside, and in her place emerged Lúconde and their debut album, "La Actriz: Acto I." The EP is a magical collection of alt-perreo, conscious boleros, and progressive Latin soul. As Rivera explains, "Lúconde is basically the mother personality that serves as a vessel for other personas (or faces, as she calls them) to emerge." For that reason, she invites listeners to call her by either name. Lúconde is an artist with lots of ideas, who has been searching a long time for a way to express them. A child of dancers from reggaeton's early roots, when it was known as "underground" - her mother was a background dancer for Vico C, while her father danced for Ruben DJ - she grew up in a home that valued both music and performance and the overlap between the two. Lúconde was enrolled in ballet, where dance and expression are inextricably intertwined, and sang in her church's chorus, where she began to discover her voice and test its limits and range. Not soon after, she was convinced by friends to audition for her school's drama club. In a prescient twist, the monologue used for the audition belonged to a role about a character suffering from dissociative identity disorder. "I remember researching a lot. I remember practicing [the monologue] alone at home. I had no training whatsoever, but I remember clicking with that a lot," she says. "There was a lot of that process that clicked with me very deeply, and I remember thinking, 'OK, I love music and I've always been involved with music, but I think [acting] is going to be something that I'm gonna dedicate myself more to.'" For "La Actriz: Acto I," Lúconde reached back and channeled the lessons from her days doing theater. She recalls being taken by the way acting helped her to connect with her inner thoughts and widen her view of the behaviors of people around her. "I learned [to] not take things at face value, which is something that I feel like I'm actively studying within myself and society - just looking at things from different perspectives," she says. "There's always more behind someone, which I also think in acting that's what you [search for]." During the downtime that enveloped the world in 2020, she began to think about how she could fuse her interests. She began to write, thinking on topics that were close to her. She began to flesh out the overarching concept of the EP and conjured up what would become the roster of alter egos that embody each track: La Malasuerte, Näia Kiyomi, Lilu, Miss Quinn, Bo Aracnia, Adela, and Nina Sorei. Executing out such a far-out idea for a debut EP was a risky proposition, but she was determined to bring it to fruition. Through mutual contacts she got in touch with Gyanma, an indie fan favorite who produces projects for himself and others out of his own studio, called Alas. Whatever trepidation he had about the ambitious ideas she presented evaporated as soon as he put her in front of the microphone. "From the beginning, I recognized it was a very unique concept," says Gyanma, who produced every track on the EP. "Throughout recording and producing the music, every track kept evolving, and when we listened to the final album put together, we knew it was something very, very special." As a companion to the album, Lúconde produced, directed, and starred in music videos for the tracks. It's here that her different personas can truly be appreciated. La Malasuerte, a trickster changeling that occupies every frame of "Macacoa" with mischievous intentions. Näia Kiyomi, heavily inspired by Jennifer Check of the movie "Jennifer's Body," enacts empowered, violent revenge in "6eis." Lilu and Bo Aracnia both break the rules in favor of righteous anarchy in "Bendito Caos" and "Tus Cartas Póker," respectively. In "El Frío del Alba," Adela reflects on the long, sordid history and pain that women have carried throughout the struggle for bodily autonomy, especially in the face of eroding abortion rights. "This is very autobiographical. What I'm doing is just taking the Stanislavski technique of acting and transforming it into a p