I’ve reviewed a couple of Alvin Curran’s CD releases
before, with
Maritime Rites coming high up the list of
favourites, and with some gems to be found in a set of
The Early Works, the 1970s. This release has the
shofar as a central element, basically a blown musical instrument made out
of an animal’s horn. Curran’s booklet notes take us from
historical context, the shofar “a form of petrified time, like
dinosaur breath caught in a mass of frozen swamp muck… from back when
things were all-natural… when noise, breath, speech and music were all
the same”, to the pragmatic realities of producing “angelic
tones or bestial schmutz with very little margin in between, [while being]
forced to face the limits of human breathing.”
Curran has taken his shofar and blown it all over the world, a life
in music summed up in his brilliant little biography: “Since 1965
Alvin Curran has been making music with any sound, any instrument, any
person, in any place, anytime.” This kind of anti-diva life in music
and approach to performing is something to which all us musicians should
aspire, perhaps to a greater or lesser extent, bust aspire nonetheless.
The unearthly, or uhr-earthly sound comes straight at us, pure and
unadorned in the opening
Shofar Puro Alap, the overtones of the
instrument calling out, and finally becoming overdubbed and layered to
create a shifting, unsettling carpet of tones. There is of course a great
deal which can be done with such material, and Curran retains the integrity
of his instrument while at the same time generating strangeness and unusual
associations. He mixes the human nature of the making of music with animal
sounds in
Shofar X 17, a remarkable combination which ends up
returning to the foghorns of
Maritime Rites, mechanical sounds and
fragments of other recordings which subsume the shofar and make it seem the
gentler victim rather than the proud proclaimer.
Shofar T Tam returns to the more natural effects of a trio of
shofars, starting with the sounds of wind through the tubes, and expanded in
texture through electronic filtering and further sounds from a large gong or
tam-tam. More overtly Jewish is
Alef Bet Gimel Shofar, which combines
the spoken letters of the Hebrew alphabet with sampled sounds. This is
another incredible mix of sounds, some quite hard-hitting, others
communicating humour and stressful anguish, at least in the intensity of the
way they are piled on top of each other in an uneven rhythmic soundscape.
The
Shin Far Shofar tracks come from a sound installation, gathering
together magical old recordings of Ashkenazi cantors and shofar sounds over
a sound bed of oscillator tones to create a vast perspective of marvellous
depth. The second of these is another combination of such sound sources,
this time adding didgeridoo and ship’s horns. Choral sounds floating
in the distance create a halo of something heavenly in the early section,
while wailing mortals wander the earth, look upwards and call to the
unattainable.
Sandwiched in between the
Shin Far Shofar and turning the
three tracks into a kind of unified concerto is
Shofar der Zeit, is
described as a “free mix of materials recorded during my 1990
performances at the WDR … high energy improvisation.” This gains
in energy what it loses somewhat in transparent clarity, but there is no
denying the forceful impression it leaves. Alvin Curran’s
Shofar
Rags is filled with the kinds of things you might have encountered in
dreams or nightmares, but having experienced it once you will want to go
back and make sure you were
really hearing such things. A few
crackles of distortion at peak volumes aside this is a well-produced
recording, the booklet is very well documented by the composer, including
illustrations of score sheets and some photos so you can imagine the
physical straining of the soloist. Like a museum filled with two-headed
sheep in glass jars,
Shofar Rags is too full of marvels to be
ignored.
Dominy Clements
