I haven't posted a music-themed entry for quite a while, so here's one that's timely. I received a review copy of this CD some time ago but only now have I paid serious attention to it. The CD is PRINCIPLE OF SILENCE: LIVE, by multi-instrumentalist "Vidna Obmana" (Dirk Serries), and Joris De Backer on string bass. It is a record of a concert that took place on the Winter Solstice of December 21, 2002, held in the Theobaldus Chapel in Brecht, Belgium.

You may remember early on in this Weblog, I posted a number of articles about experimental ambient/electronic music. This is one of my specialties and over the years I have written numerous reviews of this kind of music. "Vidna Obmana" is one of the masters of the genre. If you wish, you may read my earlier entry about him here.

Vidna Obmana combines forces with a fellow Belgian, bass player Joris De Backer, calling their ensemble PRINCIPLE OF SILENCE. While Obmana is mainly self-taught, with a strong influence from "world" and aboriginal music, De Backer is classically trained as well as experienced in jazz and avant-garde bass playing. He is equally at home with the bowed bass of classical music and the plucked bass of jazz.

The live recording is unedited and unmixed, recorded, as the album notes say, "real-time onto CD without overdubs." So basically what you hear is what went forth into that chapel in December 2002. The set is divided into five sections, though the transitions are unmarked except for the CD divisions and there is no gap between them. Obmana brings with him a variety of instruments, including an electric guitar which is not only played by hand but bowed, and his signature Hungarian "fujara" flutes, which play overtones and microtones. He also has an array of synthesizers, looping machines, and digital reverb which melts his notes together in true "ambient" fashion. De Backer has only his bass, but he plays with bow, plucked, bowed harmonics, and even at one point uses the body of the bass as a percussion instrument.

The opening section is called "Solstice," and is a drifting introduction into the dissonant soundworld of Obmana's surrealistic vision, where he plays his overtone flute against sustained, slow notes by DeBacker. Everything goes slowly, mysteriously, like floating grey clouds over the Low Countries' wet fields. The second section, "The underneath," brings in a slow, regular rhythm, marked by the bass, marching steadily along accompanied by soft, looped wails from Obmana's flute. It has a ritualistic quality that mixes the influence of shamanistic sound from aboriginal sources and later religious music from Europe.

The third section, "Choral," is a drone piece, where both DeBacker's bass and Obmana's synthesizers stay on sustained notes that play subtly against each other, sometimes in fifths and sometimes in microtones. This is the only piece with a clear vocal element, as one or both of the musicians chant over the intensifying drones. "Choral" ends as the drones subside into the next piece, "Netherworld." The bass again sets the ritualistic rhythm as Obmana casts eerie loops of sound into the mix. As the piece progresses, Obmana returns to his fujara flute, soloing with a subterranean, dissonant virtuosity.

The last piece, "The Fall," is presented both as an audio track and as a video, playable on the computer. The last 12 minutes or so of the concert have been documented in a sophisticated short film by Patrick Ceuppens, shot in soft sepia monochrome tones. The film shows the two players, wearing their headphones to hear the electronic effects, standing beside the altar like cyber-angels. They look rather alike, at least in the dim light of the chapel, which is lit only by many candles and by a pale light seeping through the high windows. As the music unfolds, Ceuppens shows us the old wooden carvings of the chapel, as well as the architecture, the furniture, and the windows, giving us as much of the visual experience as can be recorded onto a CD. The chapel is small, filled with perhaps thirty listeners, though it is hard to count them given the perspective of Ceuppens' camera. Ceuppens at one point focuses on the figure of Jesus on the crucifix, and the whole effect is very much religious, even though there is no specific religious content to the music.

Usually, Obmana's music is in the "dark ambient" category, and this concert would qualify, but I won't categorize it so easily this time. It may be slow, droning, and dissonant, but here in this religious environment, on the day of the year's turning in Advent just before Christmas, it is neither dark nor despairing, but reverent. In this last piece of the concert, about two-thirds of the way through, DeBacker returns to conventional tonality, setting down a three-note row, descending slowly down a minor scale, which brings the experimental work back into the realm of European concert and religious music. Even so, as the bass repeats the three note row, Obmana still plays his eccentric flute harmonies until the very end. There is well-deserved applause when they finish, something which I have not heard in other "live" ambient performance records.

This is a contemplative, even soothing meditation on winter and the sleeping world just at the turning of the year. It is a darkness which is not scary or chilly, but the darkness of a world at rest, of empty fields and bare trees and the beauty of a minimal, austere landscape.

You can find this album, with information about it, at the Principle of Silence website which will direct you to the Vidna Obmana website where you can, if you are interested, purchase this PRINCIPLE OF SILENCE recording.

Decorating the avant-garde christmas tree

I have a miniature, artificial Christmas tree which I decorate most years according to the Year Color (see previous entry of December 9). Usually I choose Tschaikowsky's "WINTER DREAMS" symphony #1 as the background music. But this year I used this compelling solstice vision of Obmana and DeBacker as my tree-decorating music. Thus emerged the Electric Green Christmas Tree, which can be viewed here, photographed in its place in my studio. The green free-form decorations are cut from craft foam and hung on the tiny branches with ordinary metal ornament-hangers. The silvery humanoid figure near the top of the tree is my Vampire Elvis Christ the Redeemer trinket, a unique treasure acquired many years ago in Cambridge, Mass. Underneath the tree can be seen my 1986 Red Sox American League Champions Christmas ornament. Give thanks to Reality and the new universe, for it was finally our year in 2004. The tree is topped by a green and silver flame. I have never seen any Christmas tree topped by a flame, but this is my winter invocation of the auroral energies of charged divine matter.

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