Shamansong
(New Albion) Used CD $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
The title-track, according to no less an authority than Blue Gene Tyranny, is “a mysterious 25-minute concert suite from a soundtrack to Anima, a film concerning a woman who journeys to the desert seeking to enter ‘the world where magic happens’ by performing certain rituals and labors. La Barbara recorded voice (sighs, whispers, lamentations, ululations, calls, cries echoed by the surroundings, lullabies and ‘vocal winds’) and percussion sounds (ancient Balinese gamelan instruments, tar and dumbek hand drums, shakuhachi, music box tines, rainstick, and African rattles) on location, high in the rocky cliffs of Diablo Canyon, NM, with its ‘ravens and echoes, birds and thunder’. Several of these sounds are also modified by computer…. ‘Rothko’… emulate[s] painter Mark Rothko’s layering techniques in sound…. Tapes of multiphonic and microtonal voice choirs and bowed pianos move through … space…. The mood is sombre, meditative and intense, with a pervasive constantly moving drone filling and reconfiguring itself in the space as a living presence. ‘Calligraphy II / Shadows’ … for voice and Chinese wind, string and percussion instruments … [is] gentle [and] evocative [of mysterious] gestures.” From 1998. Drilled barcode