Ariel Zetina

Sestina

Download: Sestina

Number one club diva Ariel Zetina launches Mixtape Club with Sestina — a raw, hypnotic mix of new and unheard music from Ariel and her peers in Chicago’s club scene.

Drawing on Ballroom pressure, Chicago hard-house and Florida breaks, Sestina is a masterclass in momentum — spiralling melodies and relentless drumlines building into a heady crescendo of total club transcendence.

A sestina is a fixed form in poetry, using an intricate pattern of repeating words to create new meanings within each stanza. Ariel takes inspiration from this form for her own productions and in putting this mixtape together:

“I’m obsessed with repetitions, motifs that come and return, repeating patterns and arpeggios, basically any time music is playing uses the mere fact that is repeating a pattern to create a mood. This mix is made up of about 50% unreleased tracks from me, and 50% tracks from my friends, most of whom live and work in Chicago and are vital to the sound that has come to define my scene.

“Sestina is a poetry form composed of six stanzas with six lines each, followed by a three line stanza with three lines each. I love this form because it isn’t informed by rhyme but by word choice, and how those images transform and can mean different things (check out Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sestina’). Every line ends with one of six words. For example if the first stanza’s last words are:

1. Shell
2. Hibiscus
3. Club
4. Machine
5. Airy
6. Mermaid

“The next stanza will have these same end words, but in the order 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3 (basically last, first, last, first, last, first). This happens for four more stanzas. The seventh stanza contains all the words again, but this time only in three lines.

“I love this form because of the cyclical nature. At first it doesn’t seem cyclical because it moves seemingly erratically, until at last the perfect pattern emerges.

“There is Chicago house influence [on the mixtape] of course (as you will hear on a track like Madeline’s Fantasy Daddy and Monae’s Cisphobic) but there is vital work happening in techno (Fuj, ALTVR, Dalibor Cruz, Miss Parker). Special shout out to Mister Wallace, one of the members of Futurehood who I have known for years. This party and Trqpiteca were vital in my musical upbringing.

“I have been working on collaborations a little more and this mixtape is a sample of what is to come from me in the future. Much love to all the studio sessions that happened in 2020 whether remote or in that small in-person window at the beginning. My club sound is about this energy, where it is always about dancing, and it is always hard, but it is never just about being hard. Melody that becomes percussion, percussion that becomes melody is my jam.”

Based in Chicago and a resident at the legendary Smartbar, Ariel runs a host of club nights across the city (Diamond Formation, Rosebud, Ariel's Party, Rumors) and is a playwright and poet as well as producer and DJ.

Last year, she released MUAs at the End of the World, one of our very favourite records of 2020 and a mission statement of sorts from Ariel — stemming "from the rhythms of putting on makeup, and the perception of makeup as armor, barrier, stealth.”

You can follow Ariel Zetina on Bandcamp, Twitter and Instagram.

Mixtape Photo: Ren Rodriguez
Mixtape Design: All Purpose Studio