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The
ambience of some unknown – distant, but not frightening – urban
environment surrounds you, as a recurrent, unidentified tone – bluish,
violet – moves in and out of view like a flickering corner shade in a
painting by one of the impressionists. Sudden laughter hits hard,
insanely. A voice talking in Italian is heard in a muffled,
behind-the-car-wreck type of way, and a distant city (?) murmur is
detected. Then it suddenly halts, stops… silence! …and starts again,
but now with a tone that takes on the guise of microphone overload
smearing the whole sounding space. The voice returns, and the city
murmur too.
This is like eavesdropping on an environment which wasn’t supposed to
be heard, like hearing the old Greeks by turning pottery around,
listening with a tree stick poked into the revolving surface (like som
enthusiasts thought they possibly could). There’s as much human soul
and tragedy in this dusty, sunny recording as in Björk’s latest
moraine- and glacier anxiety (“Aurora” from “Vespertine”), and
the human predicament is stripped bare, reduced to this spot of shade in
the corner of the yard, where someone is upset, while the bus passes
outside on the street and the dust is filling the mouths of the
pedestrians who have not withdrawn to shady coffee shops.
The poetry in this recording – “E non mi resta che tornare solo” – is the
desolate, barren, dusty, sunny loneliness in the anonymous crowd that
you find in the sunniest books of J. M. G. Le Clèzio, and on some of
the most earnest pages of Graham Greene. It is a poetic sound
environment where a glass of water is the most precious thing thinkable,
and where the act of loving is just a rose in a broken glass on a rusty
table, while the pidgins suffocate in the heat of the city. It’s a
fading black-and-white snapshot from distant decades when suicide was
the most forbidden of acts. The occurrence of xöömej (khoomei)
overtone singing is a feverish dream that ends in violent applause, like
cubes of ice falling over your head in the merciless heat. Wonderful!
(...) |
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