A Riddle I Am Not the Right One to Solve
I believe I am not the right person to grapple with all the existential questions of faith and culture that the multidisciplinary artist and political experimentalist Abdullah Miniawy grapples with on his latest album, Nigma Enigma. The record is equal parts Arabic chant, folk music, and sound art, based on modular synths and field recordings. The Egyptian composer uses the album’s eleven abstractions as the soundtrack to what he himself calls »an Arabic opera of doubt and faith«. But as a non-Arab, lifelong atheist, it is difficult for this reviewer to fully engage with the big questions Miniawy poses in his mother tongue, while samples of crackling fires and layers of filtering create an otherwise enigmatic atmosphere that resonates well with the album’s title. As the music also functions as the soundtrack to an immersive video game, we are taken even further from familiar territory, given that the reviewer has not touched such things since Quakein 1992.
If one sets aside the search for meaning and allows oneself to be colored by the music’s immediacy, what emerges is a strongly conceptual, sonically accomplished work, in which Miniawy’s voice – most often chanting Arabic phrases from old folk songs – is interwoven with electronic noise. In particular, the transition from the beautiful two-part chanting on »Jayhano Al Kawahi« – with strong religious undertones – to the deeply anarchic noise vignette »Half a Year II«, featuring filtered sine tones and pounding bursts of bass noise, serves as an apt characterization of a minimalist piece of sound art.
Yet without being able to share Miniawy’s cultural and spiritual context, the album feels like a riddle I cannot solve. Like drinking an Irish coffee without the whiskey: the real praise is withheld. Nigma Enigma will speak to those who can relate to the spiritual and philosophical questions Miniawy raises, while others may experience it as a musical journey without fully understanding its destination.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
The Art of Decay
It's seriously clammy as you step down into the Cisterns beneath Søndermarken – humid, with brick columns dripping with condensation and chalk stalactites hanging down. A piano has been left down here for five months, slowly deteriorating. I was skeptical about Opløsninger: yet another Annea Lockwood-inspired work, simply inflicting violence on a poor instrument? And if not, is a composer like August Rosenbaum, who works with short, vibe-friendly piano pieces, the right person to elevate the idea into something greater? Yes, as it turns out, fortunately.
Together with visual artist Ea Verdoner, Rosenbaum has created an installation piece that spans three chambers, and in the first, you indeed see the decayed piano with centimeter-thick mold patches on the keys. As you shuffle along to the second chamber, Rosenbaum sits in the dark in front of a better-preserved grand piano. His playing is both minimalist and grandiose, but it’s the breaks in the composition that truly captivate me. Half motifs, repeated triplets, tritone-like intervals. Rosenbaum loops a captured sound from the decayed piano on a sequencer, gets up, and walks away briskly. He returns and turns up the industrial rumble of a gong, as if he were Trent Reznor in the studio. Combined with choreography about duality, a voice-over about life and birth, and a video about the body and decay, it becomes an exciting and reasonably new depiction of the raw, cold, and arbitrary nature of decomposition.
The Perfect Storm
It is rare for an album to be complimented for lulling someone to sleep. But after a month with the album Cymatic by the Swiss-resident, Hong Kong-born Natalja Romine, I have often found myself slipping into dreamland – something I rarely consider a good thing. In the case of Cymatic, however, it is a clear strength. Yanling comes from the world of art music, and the work has already been presented in that context. Still, it stands strong as a piece of cinematic sci-fi ambient. Names like Jean-Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, and Hans Zimmer haunt the album, as modular noise clouds, female vocals, and mysterious electronic pulses and sine waves blend together to create a harmonious tapestry. It is not groundbreaking, and the tracks can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Nevertheless, the captivating piano riffs on »Transmuted« and the gurgling bass synths on »Nebula« stand out. On »Fallen Tempest«, choirs, chords, and reverb coalesce into a higher unity, and on the album's pinnacle, »Aura Nova«, sudden synth stabs threaten to wake one from the dream.
Cymatic is not a masterpiece and can appear on gray days as disposable ambient for a Hollywood blockbuster no one wants to watch. But over time, it grows into a brilliant piece of contemporary art, only suffering from slightly too perfect production and somewhat grandiose gestures. Why get upset over the storm in your teacup if it storms in the right way?
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
If John Malkovich Could Sing, It Would be Devilish Singing
»Please, conductor play and give me some fucking peace«. The mass murderer – and now a writer, as he became one in prison – Jack Unterweger (John Malkovich) demands more »old fashioned music« as he talks about his barbaric actions in the forests of Vienna. We are at Unterweger's book reception. The baroque orchestra Orchester Wiener Akademie sits on stage as witnesses, while Malkovich strangles sopranos Marie Arnet and Theodora Raftis with their underwear to arias by Mozart, Vivaldi and Haydn. Yes, opera is often about men hitting on women.
»I don't usually like this kind of music, it makes me nervous«. Yes, of course, because the baroque music played on period instruments is not just lame background music, but an active narrator which »disrupts« the sales pitch of a monologue, and the repulsive truth that Malkovich wants to share with us – the murder of nine prostitutes. He would rather be a murderer than nothing, he says. But the two singers also make him roll on the ground like a child; he gasps, becomes uncomfortable in his white suit. These moments elevate The Infernal Comedy to more than a clever concept (well-known actor, ok well-known orchestra, authentic murder story). The women gain a glimmer of dignity, while Malkovich's Unterweger loses it. Now what is he without Dandy sunglasses?
The Infernal Comedy was created for Malkovich in 2008, his joker face, his swaying, yes über musical voice. We want to buy his books because evil sells. As a super simple chamber music piece it works. If Malkovich suddenly announced that he now wanted to sing opera, we would also buy a ticket. But how would this story of misogyny sound with the baroque music of 2024?
Drums of Dissent
With her latest album, saxofonist and composer Maria Faust has put the political at the center of jazz, in the long tradition of Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Charlie Haden, Fred Frith and Tom Cora, just to name a few. What is surprising is her choice of genre, marches, which is not a per se a traditional jazz form. If Charles Mingus, for instance, payed his tribute to New Orleans marching bands, Faust’s choice is definitely antagonistic. The marches she manipulates and destroys from the inside are not of the entertaining sort, unless you’re a general, as they are of the military and nationalistic kind.
Faust’s score would be a perfect fit for plays like Alphonse Allais’s Père Ubu and Bertold Brecht’s The Resistible Ascension of Arturo Ui, in its use of the grotesque as a creative driving force. Faust’s genius however doesn’t lie in turning these marches into farcical circus fanfares, but in creating a truly threatening space within the music, through chaos but also heart-breaking dissonances, which could be heard as a reminiscence of the wailers mourning their dead fallen in the war. Her fairly large ensemble – seven musicians, plus herself – which is composed of six horns and two drums/percussion creates a perfect harmony-disharmony universe, as if Charles Mingus and Sun Ra had worked together.
Marches Rewound and Rewritten is a seminal and important album which shines darkly in these difficult times and reminds us that everything is political – especially music.
A Seedy Hotel Room Becomes the Stage For Lives, Traumas, and Music
Two chamber operas by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran, both adapted from plays by her uncle, Mark O’Halloran. The first, Trade, is utterly compelling and deeply moving: the story of two men meeting for sex in a grubby hotel room, whose intertwining lives are burdened by trauma and love. The composer writes of the »beautiful economy« in her uncle’s language and the same could be said of her music, which charges the text with more and more tension and urgency without cramping it – but just as often barely registers at all, letting theatre and storytelling rule. The vocal acting is outstanding.
The stylistic resourcefulness of Trade, in which the two characters are so vividly drawn, returns in the monologue Mary Motorhead but with less success. Here, musical sampling can get in the way of our view of the prisoner, who tells of her troubled life before she split her husband’s head open with a knife. Taken with Trade, though, it only emphasizes O’Halloran’s brilliance with theatre and deft musical hand. Would it be too much to hope for one or two truly theatrical, storytelling operas like these in the avant-garde strand of Copenhagen Opera Festival?