Marina Herlop’s conservatory training was on full display on her first two albums, 2016’s Nanook and 2018’s Babasha. On the first, the Barcelona-based pianist and singer struck up a dialogue with composers like Debussy and Chopin, pairing knotty, neo-Romantic arrangements with wordless phonemes whose seemingly cryptic significance—in fact, they meant nothing at all—contrasted with the striking clarity of her voice. On the second, she pushed further into the shadows, rounding out piano and voice with electronics and overdubbing.

Herlop’s first single for Berlin’s PAN label, where she will release her third album in 2022, breaks with the Western classical tradition. Part of a batch of songs that represent her first attempts at composing music on the computer, “miu” is based on techniques borrowed from Carnatic music of Southern India—in particular, konnakol, a style of percussive syllabic singing. She begins the song a cappella, layering her own harmonies in bright tone clusters by turns softly consonant and gratingly dissonant; now and then, she’ll strike an interval that seems to throw off microtonal sparks, overtones pulsing fast and furious. Halfway through, a reverberant bass drum rings out, and electronic percussion comes tearing across the stereo field like so much thunder and lightning. While her glitched-out electronics locate us in the here and now, there’s a feeling of ancient longing in Herlop’s call-and-response melodies: She taps into the same uncanny continuum as avant-garde singer-composers like Meredith Monk and Anna Homler, using the human voice to open a portal to distant worlds.