This week, a Lynchian tribute from Rafiq Bhatia, Abel Selaocoe’s tribute to South African hymns, and Christopher Cerrone’s recent percussion works.
A Tribute To David Lynch From Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia
Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia is part of the band Son Lux, the experimental trio best-known for scoring the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. His brand new EP with pianist Chris Pattishall is called Each Dream, A Melting Door, which features a piano that sounds like a piano and a guitar that sounds like any- and everything else. While most of the album is original music, the final track, just released, is a version of “The Voice Of Love,” written Angelo Badalamenti for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – Fire Walk With Me. Written and recorded before Lynch’s death last month, it serves to remind us of the importance of music as a mood-setting device in Lynch’s film and television work; and Bhatia’s guitar surrounds the piano with appropriately eerie, Lynchian sounds.
A World Of Sound from Abel Selaocoe
The South African-born, UK-based cellist Abel Selaocoe (se-LAWCH-way) doesn’t really cross musical boundaries – he ignores them entirely. He’ll play Bach cello suites, but he also writes music that draws on his ancestral heritage and features his voice and percussion, as well as works with electronics and site-specific sound installations. And sometimes, he’ll create a performance that seems to be all of them at once. His new album is called Hymns of Bantu, and is a celebration of the Bantu linguistic group that occupies much of sub-Saharan Africa, from Capetown all the way up to Nigeria. The album includes nods to Baroque music as well as two tracks from the repertoire of the Italian avant-garde cellist Giovanni Sollima, but most of it is Selaocoe’s own music, full of soaring, hymn-like vocals as well as rumbling throat-singing. Similarly, the cello both sings and acts as a lead percussive instrument. Opening track “Tsohle Tsohle” (“Everything Is Everything” in Sesotho, a southern Bantu language) builds up to a communal expression of joy and connection.
Adventures in Percussion from Christopher Cerrone
New York composer Christopher Cerrone’s piece “Don’t Look Down” is written for the combination of percussion ensemble and prepared piano – a piano that has been turned into a percussion ensemble itself by affixing wood, metal, magnetic bows, paper clips, and various other objects on the strings to dampen and change the sound. It’s just come out on an album of Cerrone’s recent percussion works, all recorded by the NY-based Sandbox Percussion. “Don’t Look Down” also features pianist Conor Hanick, who with Sandbox first performed this piece a few years back. The first part, “Hammerspace,” is a celebration of rhythm, but the second section, “The Great Empty,” is a spare but sparkling musical landscape, suggesting a kind of classical version of ambient electronica. The final part, “Caton Flats,” is more up-tempo and urgent, playing with the kaleidoscopic textures that both the percussionists and the pianist can produce. It can be difficult to tell who’s doing what, so it’s best to just take it all in as a masterful weaving of percussive counterpoint.