Whilst we spend a huge chunk of our time deep within exploratory music, we often have no map at all. Armed with an extremely basic understanding of fundamental aspects of music, our naivety helps us to see things at face value. This has always been the case, we want to retain some sense of responding to the adventurous sounds we’ve found – merely an astonished listener.
Whilst the technicality of the music’s creation may play a role, OBLADADA wants to give a sense of what things actually sound like, and the way they make us feel. In this ongoing blissful confusion of our journey through experimental music, occasionally some recordings do seem to point somewhere new.
One record we still regularly listen to that does just that, is Rafael Toral’s staggering Aeriola Frequencies. Perhaps the fact it still shapeshifts between academic and pure alchemy, keeps us coming back. It’s totally unpinnable. One aspect is the way it seems to handle and treat the most out there element in all music – the drone…
Imagine the actual sound components that make up your favourite electronic drone record, but all of the long electronic spaghetti strands of sound become separated and shattered rather than stretching towards the infinite. The slow illusion of growth or expansion reconfigured instead into hanging knots of ebb and flow. Out of that gradual levitation, inherent in the sound, a matrix of ups and downs tighten into focussed clusters.
The effect of cold harsh electronic ‘stuff’ slowly overlapping and blossoming into music dripping with beauty and emotion is a powerful one. Work that seems contradictory to our strained relationship with electronic detachment, rhythm and melody, attention spans, boredom and reward… Somewhere in all of this is the fixed physical human limits of scale and a desire to transmit or allude to something far larger. The effect and use of drones helps to convey, or attempt, to capture whole chunks of the infinite.
Time spent staring at the sun, time slowing or stopping, science, or a perception, drug or religious experience… A form that in any random snapshot may suggest a completely static nature, but very quickly, an open ear can sense the sound is almost microscopically edging forward. Tiny little changes are just enough to give that sense of placing you on the tiny active edge of some huge sonic expansion.
This new album by Catherine Christer Hennix – Solo for Tamburium sends us to a similarly rarefied drone packed space.
Captured from a live performance from Berlin in 2017, on an instrument made by Hennix herself, it spends 80 heady minutes bouncing around clusters of deep space light beams.
Every sound here is a tiny gesture which sparks endless variations of themselves. Almost like Hennix’s fingertips are too vast somehow to select any one exacting point in space, instead activating all the particles gathered in specific chunks of the universe.
This effect is achieved via the tamburium, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay. The piece is both a minimal patterned raga and a simple demonstration of the sounds it creates.
However, as a listening experience, Solo for Tamburium is as slight or monumental as you allow it to be. At low levels it dances like watery reflections and as the volume increases, grows into a fully realised geometrical environment. The piece spans the near limit of what a CD can store but rarely has just one pass been enough to absorb it’s hanging crystalising beauty. It’s a recording to loop for huge chunks of your day, as we all merrily hurtle through space and time.
Whilst her stellar body of work draws deeply on her parallel career as a mathematician, Solo for Tamburium again somehow straddles a deeply psychedelic or spiritual space as much as a documentation of sonic and scientific phenomena. The excited mental state this music leads you to, never feels less than completely fundamental. The soundtrack in real time, to a universe expanding between your ears.
Ultimately though, the music here beautifully follows the huge ambiguous vastness of the sleeve. A chunk of space that’s full of seeming repetition and randomness. Everything is different, everything is the same… This music is a model that follows these universal rules and illustrates them at a scale that’s merely practical for humans. On those terms, it feels like a recording that will continue to emit weird brain tingling awe for quite some time, whilst thankfully somehow, never quite becoming fully graspable…
Solo for Tamburium is space music of the highest order.
Solo for Tamburium is out now on Blank Forms and available on Double LP, CD and digitally.
Buy from Blank Forms or Bandcamp
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