Land of Kush
(Constellation)
When West meets East (or Middle Eastern), too often the musical results read like timid travelogues of people too frightened to get off the tour bus. But in the right hands -- say, unflinching ones -- the culture clash of scales, instrumentation, cultural aesthetics, etc., can blend into a mix that feeds off the volatility of most East-West meetings. Only here, nobody gets kicked off their ancestral land, blown up, or beheaded.
Land of Kush is the brainchild of Montreal composer and musician Sam Shalabi, who for two decades now has worked in multiple genres, from rock and punk to free jazz and avant-garde, under a number of names including Shalabi Effect, Detention, Molasses, Nutsak and his own. With Land of Kush, Shalabi is operating in the large-ensemble milieu, and the 30-plus member group Shalabi gathered was modeled after Nasser-era Egyptian orchestras and also inspired by an extended Shalabi visit to that country in 2006.
So what is Against the Day? Shalabi says it was inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel of the same name, and indeed it's similarly formatted into five sections that bear the corresponding chapter titles. Like the novel, its primary theme is how the light of knowledge exposes only a world of chaos. This piece was performed as a one-off highlight at a Montreal summer festival last year until Constellation Records decided to bring the massive undertaking into the studio to document it in high fidelity.
And good thing for us, too. The three primary movements are themselves mini-suites, built around solo vocalists (Jason Grimmer, Molly Sweeney and Radwan Moumneh) who composed their own lyrics. Each narrative is trellised in the raga-like drones, free-form horn explosions, synth noise, and Eastern tonal scales that Shalabi's been exploring for over two decades. The disembodied voices and creaking synths of opener "The Light Over the Ranges" eventually emerge from primordial ooze into forms we recognize via rebec-like violin, oud and guitar, and then bleed into the primal percussion and synth drone of the majestic 14-minute "Iceland Spar." Grimmer's deadpan narration adds to the buzzing-flies drone until strings join to build a fever pitch recalling the scene in Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky, where John Malkovich's character, in full Malaria delirium, eggs the players on to a frenzy matching his own. Half-way through, sax and clarinet replace strings and give the piece a more modern avant-garde character; eventually they give way to an outro of desert-noir style lap steel.
As exhilarating as that ride is, it's just the warm-up for the 20 minutes of "Bilocations." For three minutes, the tremolo notes of Gavin Sheehan's guitar absorb each other like pooling water until a caravan of percussionists and Osami Shalabi's oud provide the form for Sweeney's narrative, sung in an uncanny Earth Kitt impersonation. "I can make myself ten times more ferocious," she growls, and the furious raga underneath gives you no pause to counter that. Dave Gossage adds a breathy, Indian-flavored flute solo until at the 12-minute mark an eruption of free-form horns and a key change recalibrate the song into a haunting space-scape ala Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd.
The final two eight-minute pieces lean more avant-garde, though without losing their micro-tonal and North African percussion foundations. The title track lifts off in furious horn-noise, and Moumneh's voice is buried beneath a pulse of countless percussionists. But its groove is more taxing than hypnotic, and too similar throughout to engender the same interest as previous cuts. "Rue du Depart" essentially repeats the same formula, but does so at a relaxed pace that allows the avant-garde strings, horn and synth squiggles to build a more multi-dimensional sonic landscape until the whole record just dissipates into the distance and quiet.
But by its close, any suggestion of closure - that most Western of notions -- bleeds away like water in the desert, and you are left only exhausted from the journey.
Standout Tracks: "Iceland Spar," "Bilocations" JOHN SCHACHT
