Doing Karaoke and Talking Fowl With Duendita
With the new EP 'The Mind Is a Miracle,' nature enthusiast and Duendita leader Candace Camacho is making dreamy field recordings for the literal birds
Bar karaoke can be a lark for the inebriated weekender, but Candace Camacho isn’t fucking around. It’s a scooch shy of midnight on a Friday and she’s perched at the end of a booth, mic in hand, belting out Jessica Simpson’s “With You” in the throaty, luxurious voice that’s become her signature as Duendita. Everyone at Chino Grande, the cozy Brooklyn bar where her friend Ben is the KJ, is going bananas for it, whooping half-drunk or full-drunk or just drunk on vibes. Sitting beside Camacho are four of her friends and her sister, Vanessa, all of whom, as it happens, have professional-grade voices—the kinds you might describe as “dulcet tones,” all pitch-perfect melisma and easy glissando. I consider canceling the song I put in (“Rude Boy”) after witnessing Vanessa and her friend Ava do the Pistol Annies’ “I Feel a Sin Comin’ On,” an a cappella song that nearly silences the whole rowdy joint. Instead, I follow through and try to distract from my vocal mediocrity by mimicking Rihanna’s signature gun-finger choreography.
Upon reflection, I should have known that Camacho’s whole world, even off the clock, is suffused with good-ass musicians. In Duendita, the project that grew out of her senior thesis at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, she collaborates with a multinational collective of instrumentalists, recording across the world but most frequently in Berlin, where she lives part time, and in her hometown of New York. But she will work anywhere: This past spring, during an artist’s residency centered around climate change and the Puerto Rican diaspora, the jazz- and R&B-informed experimentalist even recorded underwater. Though she often sings about emotional and sociopolitical specifics, her lyrics are sometimes overtaken by the aura of the melody. Her music carries an underlying sense of the sacred, its minimalism grounding it in both melancholy and hope. Her creativity is a thread within the natural world’s fabric.
Camacho, 29, is in “a really good flow” right now, she says. All she really does, she says, is ride her bike and go to the studio to work on new music, which she is making constantly. In Berlin, she frequented the clubs that run all night and open into daylight, which she found musically inspiring; back in New York, she’s been tooling around the city, listening to her new tracks on her headphones with the wind at her face. “It feels like the most empowering thing I can do, just get on my bike and take myself there. No Metrocard—free-99,” she says. “It is so transformative, and you kind of are delirious but always safe. A long bike ride through Queens—nothing more romantic than that.”
On Duendita’s latest EP, The Mind Is a Miracle, released in September, a collection of soothing, ambient field recordings reflect her environmental and spatial attunement, and her songwriting turns slightly further toward the abstract. (Her archives are so rich in demos and field recordings she’s started a “living sample library” on Patreon with royalty-free sounds for anyone to use.) Bird chirps introduce her jazz-inspired vocal runs on flanged-out guitars, with harmonies layered and screwed-down as though they’re melting upon each other. “Gummy” sets out a guiding ethos, its crackling palette of vocal loops and found-sounds emblematic of the EP’s dreamy sketches.
Her vocals speed up like the parting exhale in a yoga class on “Born With Power,” a track whose soulful thump and posture-straightening piano merge the New York house music of Camacho’s childhood with her current life in the club. It began years ago as a loop sketch that Camacho recorded with her bandmate Noah Becker when they were touring in Brussels. They resurrected it while on tour in 2021 and, once they got back to New York, recorded it properly with Paul Wilson on keys—a typical example of Camacho’s ad hoc approach to making records.
Still, Camacho is stricken with the musician’s curse. Though she’s been touring fairly consistently in recent years, The Mind Is a Miracle is her first release since 2018, and in the interim she’s had bouts of depression and self-doubt. “I hope people like it,” she says. “I don’t know if they will. I’m very nervous. Will anyone even listen to it? It’s so personal. I’m still a baby artist. I was much busier before the pandemic, and right now I’m starting to get back into it, and feeling healthy enough to be in it."
For her, making music and releasing it are two altogether different prospects: the first is purely joyful, the second rife with anxiety. “I love making demos and performing live, but I don’t really love completing shit,” she continues. “So that’s why the EP really special, even if I think it’s a little corny. It’s still good that I finished something, because I just make demos all day and I like it that way. I’m trying to get popping off my Patreon, because if I could just get paid to make demos, I would. I send my demos to my friends, and they tell me if it’s hot or not. That’s my favorite part—sharing. And lately I’m just so dirty in my lyrics, and I don’t give a fuck,” she cackles demurely.
Before we hit karaoke, we share soup dumplings at one of her favorite haunts in Williamsburg, a Chinese restaurant where she often posts up when she’s back in the city. The owner lightly freaks with happiness when he sees her. “I want to have so many gigs. I like to switch up my set and try new shit and experiment,” Camacho tells me as we eat. “That’s my only dream: to have gigs all the time.” Her mother drives Camacho on tour in her GMC SUV whenever she can. “That’s my road dog,” she says. “She works remotely, so she can wake up early in the hotel. It’s so funny. I’m sleeping in.”
Tour also affords her the opportunity to bird-watch, a pastime that made its way into The Mind Is a Miracle’s sampled birdsong. She reminisces about the “really dope birds” she saw in Arizona, and breaks out her phone to show me a photo of the Gila woodpecker, a zebra-winged sweetie that lives in the trunks of Saguaro cacti. We chat a bit about the “hot duck” that lived for a time in Central Park—the Mandarin duck, which is plentiful in Berlin, where she first got into birding after haggling at a flea market for a pair of binoculars she still uses. Then she wants to show me the gray catbird, a stoic-looking songbird that’s easily spotted in her home turf of Queens, so named because its chirp sounds like a kitten mewling for milk.
Duendita seems more at ease talking about birds’ songs than her own. Maybe it’s because they have a centering effect, much like the one she achieves in the beatific atmosphere of her music. Whatever stress she might be feeling, in this moment and on the mic, she’s in her zone. She cues up the catbird song, smiles, and presses play.
