It’s a wild ride that’s over in just three-and-a-half minutes, and despite the wide range of sounds featured within, Zeta frontman Juan Ricardo Yilo, aka Juan Chi, says it’s just a “tiny sample” of what’s coming with Todo Bailarlo, the new album by the experimental punk band that’s expected to drop in 2022. Add some snippets of Spanish-language announcers, and “La Flor De La Palabra” (The Flower Of The Palabra) sounds like a radio dial skittering from station to station, never settling long on any frequency - and somehow it all coalesces in an uneasy yet joyous alliance that simultaneously swings and rocks out.
Threading through it all are bubbling horror movie electronics soaring and swarming female-fronted vocals and wailing, rampaging rhinoceros guitar.
The swinging trombone, coupled with clattering steel drum-style beats and plaintive free jazz keys, begins to suggest a South American street carnival with all the background noises pushed forward in the mix. Then, improbable Latin jazz trombone dopplers down like a freight train headed straight for your Toyota stranded at the crossing. His jittery, galloping percussion seems to infect the band’s tumbling preternatural keyboards, bass and guitar, all choppy sci-fi sound effects, like Pink Floyd’s score for Zabriskie Point, bolstered with swiping strings across fret-boards that suggest the fluttery bat-wing sounds of Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Under glowering clouds cut by the whirring rotors of a helicopter high overhead, drummer Eduardo Sandoval kicks off the jam. In the video for their latest single, “La Flor De La Palabra,” the punk band Zeta assembles on a windswept, driftwood strewn beach.
Some frequencies were clipped to bring out the helicopter’s hum. Scientists made the audio, which is recorded in mono, easier to hear by isolating the 84 hertz helicopter blade sound, reducing the frequencies below 80 hertz and above 90 hertz, and increasing the volume of the remaining signal. Listen closely, though, and the helicopter’s hum can be heard faintly above the sound of those winds. It is further obscured by Martian wind gusts during the initial moments of the flight. Even during flight when the helicopter’s blades are spinning at 2,537 rpm, the sound is greatly muffled by the thin Martian atmosphere. With Perseverance parked 262 feet (80 meters) from the helicopter’s takeoff and landing spot, the mission wasn’t sure if the microphone would pick up any sound of the flight. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its SuperCam microphone to listen to the Ingenuity helicopter on Apas it flew on Mars for the fourth time. For the first time, a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft.