Harvey’s preoccupation with much of his work is to do with how we perceive history; his contention is that we focus on visual and textual data, and overlook the auditory information. This idea informed his Noisome Spirits project, where (using his imaginative powers) he created a convincing audio portrait of 18th century Wales, starting from the writings of a Non-conformist minister and its vivid descriptions of the rugged countryside. When it comes to coal-mining in Wales, Harvey points to the “engravings, drawings and paintings” that have conventionally been sourced to tell us its story, noting how what began as a cottage industry grew into a “large and complex means of production” after the mid 19th-century. But what about the “distinctive acoustic character” of coal-mining?

Enter the 1930 film from British Movietone, South Wales Colliers Go Down the Mine, which is the primary source used by Harvey in creating this work. The date is significant; we didn’t have sound cinema until about 1927, and it was only in the mid-1920s that electrical recording equipment had been brought to the point where making an accurate sound documentary of work in a coal mine was even technically possible. Thanks to the work of the AP Archive, it’s possible to view this movie on YouTube. John Harvey waxes lyrical about its documentary qualities – the direction, the editing, the narrative skills – and he has used the soundtrack of the working environment as raw material for this record. Not just machinery (hydraulics, drills, wheels, cages) but also the voices of miners, and musical interludes sampled from the documentary chapter headings, all appear in some form. Interestingly, British Movietone seem to have adopted a different approach to their contemporaries Pathé News; Pathé tended towards spoken-word editorialising, often supplied by an announcer with a plummy voice, subtly “directing” the audience’s perception and standing open to a charge of patronising. Conversely, this South Wales Colliers film allows the miners to speak for themselves; the voiceover is provided by the pit overman, someone who actually knew the work, describing it in their own words. That said, the story on the film is mostly told in pictures and sound.

Deploying his typical skills and methods – collage, time-stretching, overlays, reverse tapes, varispeed, and digital synthesis – John Harvey has carefully created a highly simpatico sound-portrait of his chosen subject, one that is arguably very true to the original film, the work of the miners, and indeed true to a part of the country in which he grew up and knows very well. The results are not only beautiful to listen to, but can have the effect of stirring up a nostalgic feeling for the past, even if we’ve never been to Wales. I mean there’s a deep connection to the subject matter here, and it makes the record somehow more direct and accessible than his Aural Bible projects, which (much as I love them) might seem somewhat abstracted in comparison. John Harvey even adds a closing note to bring us up to date on the realities of fossil fuel extraction and its significant contribution to climate change, reminding us that this “romantic attraction” to the past does need to be framed in the context of the 21st century environmental crisis. (24/10/2022)

Quite different to the above is Seven Prayers for Stephen Chilton: Requiem (GENCD006). With his Aural Bible projects, Harvey was dealing with complex and wide-ranging ideas and themes, to do with religion, the spoken word, and printed texts; here, it’s all about one person, a former student of his whom he knew personally, and who committed suicide in 2014. As such, it’s obviously a deeply personal statement, and at one level I feel it would be too intrusive to even comment on it. There’s a religious dimension, an aspect that might connect this release to the Aural Bible works; Stephen Chilton was a painter who realised his faith through his art; he regarded his work as a “visual representation of prayer”. There’s no doubt Chilton was extremely devout. His work led him into “solemnity, exultation, lament, certainty, and doubt” as he tried to magnify God with his art. There’s a musical dimension too; Chilton listened to records of devotional works by Gorecki, Arvo Part and Thomas Tallis, and produced a series of paintings as direct responses to these musical pieces, as he worked hard to select suitable colours and hues to match the specific pitches in the music.

John Harvey was Stephen Chilton’s art tutor at Aberystwyth University and evidently became very close to the work. The record we hear is Harvey’s simpatico – that word again – attempt to restate the colour and light of a Stephen Chilton painting in sound. I refer you to the booklet notes, where he indicates the precise and methodical ways in which he achieved this “sonification” of visual information. In a way, perhaps we could regard this as the culmination of a lengthy and mysterious process – the music of Tallis and others inspires Chilton, who later recasts his spiritual insights as fine art paintings; later still, Harvey recasts these paintings as layered, abstract sound art. If there’s any point to my banal observation above, it’s just to point out the purity and beauty of the distilled music that you’ll hear on this CD. The inclusion of an unknown choir singing and sampled from the radio on ‘Prayer 4’ should bring you to the point of tears, and if it does, perhaps this record can be regarded as a success. But it’s also tragic, and deeply melancholy; as further proof of his compassion, John Harvey has dedicated this work “to all men who are challenged by mental health issues or have chosen to leave this life prematurely”.

Images of Chilton’s paintings appear on all six panels of the digipak, and there are his diary extracts reproduced in the notes; again, making me feel I’m intruding on private grief. Tremendous honesty in this release, as the creator faces up to a difficult subject and doesn’t flinch from the hard work of expressing his grief in a heartfelt and appropriate manner. A real achievement. (30/05/2022)

John Harvey’s Intersections site

Garin it was who commissioned this work; the brief presented to Petar Klanac was to create a piece for voice and gamelan, making use of medieval instruments. Klanac evidently threw himself into the task, and thought long and hard before settling on the rebec, the nyckelharpa, the tromba marina, and the chifonie. This last item is a sort of hurdy-gurdy, although on this record’s rendition we seem to have ended up with four pipe organs (whose sound may have been modified, or created, by computer software). The gamelan elements haven’t resulted in a great deal of percussion on the record, as might have been expected, and for the most part Pozgarria Da is slow, reflective, and even melancholy in tone. We could add that Ensemble 0 are not, apparently, aiming for any kind of “authentic” vibe with the use of medieval instruments, by which I mean they shouldn’t be mistaken for the David Munrow and his Early Music Consort (one of the pioneers of playing early music on genuinely old instruments). In fact I’m not entirely sure why medieval instruments feature at all, especially as the poems of Father Bitoriano Gandiaga are from the 20th century.

Which brings us to the work of this unusual monkish fellow who was born in the village of Mendata in the Basque region. He spent his life in this region and, besides teaching the language in secondary schools, wrote all his poems in Basque. Part of the commission for Pozgarria Da evidently involved making use of these poems; Petar Klanac was guided by two friends who introduced him to the work of the poet. Again, he threw himself into the task; he enlisted help from the Institut Culturel Basque so that he could better understand the idiom, and then asked a translator to put the poems into French so he could understand what they meant. Matter of fact, it’s fair to say the work began with the poems; Klanac’s task was to provide a totally sympathetic musical setting, one that must be “in the service of the poems”. For us non-Basque speakers, English texts are provided in the booklet, and Klanac’s takeway is that Father Bitoriano Gandiaga expressed a very benign view of the world, a place where a human being would be glad to be alive yet also aware of the transience of everything, and that life and death were as natural as night following the day. There’s also a subtext of a connection to one’s ancestry, one’s identity, through the metaphor of land; the earth is literally the “motherland”, according to this man. Klanac wishes to stress the childlike simplicity of Gandiaga’s poems.

Interestingly, others have interpreted the poems differently, finding them full of tension and even a certain existential doubt, a tension which this devoted man resolved through his Christian faith, a subject on which Klanac remains silent. Far from being naive and childlike, the imagery in his poems carries a lot of oppositional elements, the most notable being the dichotomy between the city and the countryside – Gandiaga saw the city as a threat, invading the peace of the country. There was some basic contradiction, or frustration, about the Basque region which he couldn’t quite reconcile. Very little of this struggle, if such it was, shows up on Pozgarria Da, but the music and vocalising do have a certain gravity and solemn air which is not inappropriate.

I think there may be one too many barriers – musical, cultural, linguistic – that prevent me enjoying this as much as I ought, and it could be that Petar Klanac’s insistence on jumping through 18 hoops has blunted the force of his artistic intention. But he has certainly shown due diligence and respect in engaging with the commission, the medieval instruments, and the poetic sources. From 11th January 2022.

Tibetan Red (i.e. Salvador Francesch) has long dropped hints in his work about his associations with Tibet, and aspects of the Buddhist religion; on this occasion he now puts this spiritual aspect to the forefront, to address the death of a particular person who was very close to him. The record states that is dedicated to his wife Angels Tebé, who died in 2020. The notes, written by Salvador and Tomaso, describe how the music is an attempt to express “the unfoldment of the different bardo thodol states” that the beloved Angels would pass through. This is the renowned ancient Buddhist text more popularly known as “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”, and as such it made an appearance in rock music culture in the 1960s (e.g. through the witterings of Timothy Leary who claims he got it from Aldous Huxley, and thence to John Lennon for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’). The bardo thodol attempts to describe the state of human consciousness after death, and also serves as a kind of “spirit guide” to help the soul find its way through the assumed stages of the afterlife.

Brave the man who attempts to translate this collection of nebulous and unknown matters into sound art, but this is precisely the task which Tibetan Red and Corbetta have set for themselves. For them, the time after death is “a set of adventures of unknown characteristics and unlimited situations,” which is putting it mildly. In these three suites, titled ‘Bardo’, ‘Crossing’, and ‘Vanishing’, they speak of visions, sound spectres, phantom profiles, and over the course of the record they hope to describe a very ceremonial journey towards “exalted states of clarity and golden perceptions”. At all times, they wish to stress that death is a “transition”, and that’s just one of the important messages they hope to convey. As to the music / sound itself, I sense that it represents a departure from the assemblage of field recordings that we have previously heard on Tibetan Red projects, although it’s possible field recordings were used; but what’s ended up on the disc is something so gently burnished, and carefully curated, that it feels almost like something perfectly formed, like a force of nature. Subtly and slowly, the music gathers pace until it does indeed suggest the passage of a soul floating along corridors of the unknown.

If we consider other musical versions of the afterlife, Keiji Haino’s would probably be dark and silver and filled with many chattering dead ancestors, while that of Pierre Henry would be very worthy and text-laden, full of sonorous verbalising. Transition is neither; a distinctly minimal, uncluttered, almost tentative sketch of things metaphysical, a zone where words have no place. At the same time, it’s beautiful to listen to. Also at the same time, there is no sense of threat or menace in this exploration of the unknown, and although there are many things we don’t understand, it’s clearly a very good place to be. I suggest that it’s the depth of feeling for a real person, and her death, that has successfully fuelled this long piece of music from its start to its finish; and this has also lent it an unbearable poignancy, yet without once descending into something sentimental or false. The ‘Crossing’ mid-section is especially moving. It may or may not be true to the structure and progress of the “spirit guide” proposed by the original ancient text (I am not an expert in this field), but I believe the creators are being very true to themselves, and they exhibit a tremendous restraint and sensitivity throughout this understated work. Even by the high standards Tibetan Red has set for himself, Transition is a unique and remarkable piece of work. From 12th August 2021.

RIP Salvador Francesch 1945-2022

Perez also does a fair bit of solo work and recently started his own Nexttime Studios label to showcase his work; effectively it’s a sub label of Discus Music. He first worked with Romanian player Hegvesi in 2010 on the Winds Of Change album. Today’s offering Garden Of Secrets downplays the computers and digital processing in favour of real instruments – Perez plays the soprano sax, but also spends a lot of time with his favoured shakuhachi flute, a move which might endear him to David Toop. Other ethnic instruments, such as the Tibetan bells, the Nepalese flute and the bodhran, also pass under his hands. Hegvesi appears to be more of a string player and is credited with the dulcimer, the gusla, the zither, the psaltery, and the prepared cymbalum; he’s not afraid to apply plucking and bowing actions to these instruments where needed. Also a percussionist, he plays the bamboo chimes and something intriguingly called the “shaman drum”. Perez wishes to stress, as he does in the press notes, that Garden Of Secrets is a very composed album, and the key words are “sound design” and “composition”, and there’s much evidence that he has spent time listening to the improvisations and doing a lot of arranging and editing (“scalpel cutting”, as he calls it, indicating the precision behind these aural mosaics) in the studio. It’s as much a canvas of electro-acoustic composition as it is a document of improvised music; and field recordings are also involved in the grand design.

Although there are a couple of lively tunes which could pass master at an open-minded jazz festival, ‘Abandoning Of Sorrow’ being one of them, the album is mostly a suite of very calming mood music, creating a serene bliss and meditative framework for the listener. Indeed the word “meditative” may not be wildly inappropriate for an album which contains hints of non-Western spirituality and religion, a theme which is further echoed in the specific use of instrumentation, and certain track titles which allude to devotional tasks and ecstatic states – e.g. ‘Slow March of the Pilgrims’ and ‘Shaman’s Dream’. The intention of Perez is to remain non-specific and explore these areas “from different angles and moods”, and the work has grown into “some kind of orchestral folk ritual”. From 10 September 2020.

John Harvey acquired a set of these LPs; as a technical side note, they play back at 16RPM, a speed which isn’t even available on modern turntables (although it was included on 1960s Dansettes). In preparing this project, it seems that he digitised the entire contents of the set, and all the material is included (one way or another) in the finished CD. If he speaks true, we’re getting the entire Old and New Testaments read to us, in compressed and edited form, in about one hour. He captured sounds of Scourby’s voice, but also the scratches and pops on these old records. There’s a long list of processing techniques detailed in the booklet, involving a form of DJ turntabling and sampling, along with studio methods such as time-stretching, distortion, amplification; the method that stands out for me is the judicious editing and stacking of the samples. He’s not concerned with simply making strange sounds (although parts of the record are very strange) as he is with bringing out meaning.

He arrived at this juncture by selecting a set of thematic concerns – “strictures imposed on the source”, as he puts it. The three main themes that interested him were (1) blindness, (2) society in the 1960s, when The Talking Bible was released; and (3) the physical records. I note here that he wasn’t explicitly interested in exploring New Testament themes, or aspects of the Christian faith, which would in any case be too much of a challenge to get onto one CD. As to the blindness, this is to respect the original context of the source, which was to minister to the needs of the blind. So for tracks 2-7, we have ingenious constructs where he’s sampled instances of the word “blind” and spliced them together, effectively making a quasi-rap out of Scourby’s words; he also splices together related stories from the four gospels themed on blindness, allowing a form of simultaneous reading that allows the variances within these versions of the same story to surface. Harvey is well aware this practice is similar to a biblical concordance, or more precisely “exegtical cross-referencing”, as he calls it. The societal theme is represented by external, found recordings; it so happens The Talking Bible was recorded in one month in 1964. John Harvey did his research and found out what else was happening in America in that one month. He then assembled recordings of interesting events representing civil rights demos and race riots, nuclear bomb tests, and the launch of a space probe. These recordings are layered in; when they appear, the whole record just takes off, opening out to reveal a view of the world in which the words of the Bible may echo and resonate. In short order it gets eerie, and very powerful.

As to the records-as-records, we have touched on aspects of this, but a couple of other things I wanted to mention; one is the amazing piece ‘God Breathed’, which apparently makes use of a composite track where the entire set of digitised sounds has been superimposed into a bizarre, murmuring drone. Harvey describes it as “a composite overlay of all 67 discs of the Old and New Testaments”, compressed into 3:43 minutes. The sheer effort involved in creating this is impressive, but when you hear it, it’s not laboured or overstated at all. The other aspect I like is simply the rhythm of the whole set, particularly in the early tracks; the scratchiness of the records, and Scourby’s reading voice, both work together in Harvey’s hands to create fascinating internal pulses and beats. The techniques may be familiar to us from hip-hop culture, but there’s a real subtlety in Harvey’s patient, methodical craft.

And the opening moments of the CD …”He that hath ears to hear, let him hear”… ought to bring a tingle of excitement to any listener. It sets the scene perfectly for this entire project, inviting us to join this exciting adventure in sound. Further, it encapsulates the entire theme of the piece, and the method used to make it, in a single snippet of sound art and scripture.

Highest recommendation for this innovative, well-researched and ingeniously crafted work of sound art. From 31st December 2019.

Further reading: The Biblical Record: Converting Scripture into Sound

Christian Meaas Svendsen with Nakama
New Rituals
NORWAY NAKAMA RECORDS NKM016 3 x CD (2019)

Norwegian bass player Christian Meaas Svendsen is highly regarded in these pages, whether flying solo or among friends. I was taken with the eloquent songcraft of Avin, Rupert Loydell remarked on his ‘intriguing’ double bass explorations, while Mr. Pinsent was impressed by the principled approach to group improvisation adopted by the five-piece Nakama he inhabits. No solos, for one thing. Pure gestalt. And some of the most compelling spiritual jazz (if it can be called that) currently on the market.

There’s a bit of everything here and much more besides, neatly organised into three individual discs, housed in an elegant paper folder along with a detailed account of how the project came about. But lest the Buddhist theme suggest an orderly listening experience, prospective listeners can be assuaged: nothing here will set this collection comfortably alongside your Buddha Beats box set, nor need one fear ‘cultural appropriation’, corporately neutered ‘mindfulness’ or happy-clappy spiritualism. Each part, while utterly distinct, contains a recital of a Zen Buddhist sutra (or chant, in this instance) in a distinct shade of fire and fury.

The first features an explosive ensemble pairing of the 5-piece Nakama with a Buddhist choir: full fire and brimstone with extra Alice Coltrane points for fury and fervor. The chanting of Lotus Sutra carries a hammering cadence that only Japanese syllables can permit; a ball of flame with every blow. Better yet, the lyrics are gobbledygook, both to Japanese speakers and non-. Somewhere in translation / transliteration from Sanskrit all meaning was lost and thus practitioners engage with these nonsensical utterances as an act of semantic sabotage against rational thought. The experience is thus an emotional one and potent at that.

The emotional drop-off in two is pronounced. Gone are both the spiritual and the jazz, and Nakama (which, perhaps coincidentally, means ‘friend’ or ‘colleague’ in Japanese) reformulate the opening statement as a modern chamber improvisation replete with stark tonalities and almost arbitrary exchanges. It is skeletal and diffuse, closer to a modernist sculpture than an act of religious devotion; or a koan: riddles used by Zen masters to trick their students to enlightenment by subverting rational thought. As Ed Pinsent previously pointed out, Nakama play as an egoless organism, here constructing a web of taps, rattles, gurgles and other off-cuts around a sporadically recurring piano figure. Close listening may yield clues to this section’s kinship with the first, but nothing less.

New surprises abound when Svendsen takes the spotlight in part three, upending the notion that the solo format reduces the scope for musical expansiveness. Allusive and propulsive by turns and increasingly vigorous, he wraps his bass and throat around the ascending piano figure from Nakama’s rendition in a subtle theme and variation approach, which seems set to resolve than shatter the listener’s mind. If part two captured the mystery of the ritual, then Svendsen’s solo section is its revelation: same lyrics, new meanings, from softly spoken sutra to deadly ‘Dharani’ in a voice that could banish demons and, apparently, disasters. Every fierce pluck of ‘Shakyamuni Eko’ rattles the nerves while the second ‘Dharani’ is full-blown conflagration. So much for ‘peace and love’.

The idea behind the set is that far from a unified vision of what could be, it comprises but three possible interpretations of the selected sutra. Svendsen may thus consider the potential musical exploration to be one of many lifetimes or reincarnations. It’s a good start and, contrary to the teachings of Buddhism, this collection’s a permanent keeper.

Kult Following

Rudolf Eb.er
Om Kult: Ritual Practice of Conscious Dying Vol. II
JAPAN OM KULT OM-2 CD (2018)

This is more of an addendum to my review of Rudolf eb.er’s Om Kult 1, as Om Kult 2 is virtually the same beast. Eb.er’s followers will doubtless know what to expect and for this reason I can probably rope Om Kult 3 into the herd before hearing it. This is not intended as a criticism: the three volumes are presented as a ‘triptych’; a coherent, iconographic project in which the discrete, interconnecting themes of death and displacement are signaled through repeated references to swollen corpses, brown masses, body parts, and psycho-energetic practices. In Hegelian terms, this should be part 1’s antithesis but no such dynamic is evident: the only discernable antagonism is towards false binaries such as mind and body, which again manifest in juxtapositions of sine waves, field recordings and increasingly remote ‘body’ signifiers like rhythm. As per the previous volume, death is depicted not as a termination but as a transitional (or ‘bardo’) state of physical decay, one in which the advanced meditation practitioner ejects the mind from the body at the appropriate moment (‘phowa’) and retains consciousness in the succeeding reincarnation. Thus the concluding invocation of ‘the Psychopomp’ – the guide of souls to the realm of the dead – to usher the transition from decaying matter to spirit energy. While some may perceive in this an increasingly and irritatingly familiar set of sonic and thematic tropes, Eb.er’s persistence with this theme should just as easily remind listeners of the value of deep and meditative listening, ample in supply here.

Crucially, the carols are old traditional Polish Christmas songs that have been translated into Arabic. The purpose and cultural resonance of this action has been dissected and analysed by Pawel Mosicicki in the enclosed liner notes, where he discourses at some length on the history of carols, the meanings of the Nativity story, and the implications of the statements of Majewska and Marcin. If I understand all of this correctly, Taratil ‘Id Al-Milad is intended as a critique of xenophobia. The modern world is in complete disarray. Wars, natural disasters, and internal conflicts have escalated the refugee crisis into epic proportions, creating situations which no country is prepared to deal with. Certainly not mainland Europe, at any rate. The current Brexit muddle that is tearing my own country apart is but one symptom of a much larger catastrophe in waiting; apparently our national response to it is simply to dig ourselves in even deeper, breed and encourage more hatred of foreigners, and deny immigrants any opportunity to settle – all of this naked intolerance disguised under the euphemistic phrase “control of our borders”.

It is this global problem, arguably one of the big issues of the day, which has inspired Taratil’ Id Al-Milad. The creators use ingenious strategies to convey their meaning. Firstly, the meticulous translation of a European language into an Eastern language shows, at a single deft stroke, how it is at least possible to integrate human discourse between otherwise divided continents in a meaningful manner, and also communicate something of value thereby. Secondly, the Christmas theme reminds us of one of the core meanings of the Nativity story; Joseph and Mary were refugees, Christ was looking for a place to lay his head, and it’s possible to read the story as applying to the fate of many migrants today. What does that say about us Europeans as a so-called Christian society? One question this album may be asking is about simple human compassion. Lastly, there’s the way the songs are delivered: sad, resigned, melancholic, longing for a time when we were perhaps more complete as human beings, quite unlike the self-serving and competitive culture of today. It would have been possible, I suppose, to make a record seething with anger and spleen at gross social injustices, but instead Barbara Kinga Majewska sings with dignity and sorrow, and Marcin Masecki plays stark, forlorn piano notes of icy beauty. Beneath this apparent stiff composure, there lies great emotional truth, compacted into well-constructed taut songs.

And so – even though this listener can’t understand a single word that’s being sung (no libretto or translations are provided), the meaning of this metaphor is shining plain to see. This record ought to be required listening at the UN High Commission for Refugees! From 4th December 2018.

By now you may have formed an impression of the romantic and poetical sensibilities of Michael Serafin-Wells and Summer Serafin, plus their French protégé Sylvia Solanas (who joined them for this new record), since even their press release is full of the kind of decorative language that beguiles rather than overwhelms the listener. I think they’re also devoted Christians, if highlights of their back catalogue are any indicator – their 2016 album Electric Hymnal was a “collection of devotional songs…a meditation and sonic prayer.” Likewise 2015’s Angels is another clue. Besides the religion, they’re also enchanted by dreams and dream-worlds, and the themes of the oneiric life of slumberland and night visions regularly surface in their work too. Indeed the album before this was called Sometimes In Dreams. There’s a tragic dimension to the band’s history too, since band member Summer Serafin has been dead since 2011, leaving partner Michael to carry on the project; and he’s pretty dedicated to preserving her memory, through photographs and texts – and even recordings of her voice, which continue to appear; she’s on this record, at any rate. He evidently bears this tragedy with a certain amount of humility and acceptance. Maybe tragedy is one of the hallmarks of Bipolar Explorer’s music; Michael himself nearly joined the angelic choir recently, suffering heart failure outside the hospital he’d just been released from, after being hit by a car.

Let’s hope he sticks around long enough to keep making music, as this album is a tiny gem; its simplicity can’t help but win you over, and its sincerity pours out of every moment. True, the tone is slightly monotonous and in one sense we’re hearing the same fundamental song-approach several times over, but strangely enough that works very well for me; the record becomes mesmerising and fascinating through this repetition, never boring. In sum, voices, instruments and muffled production all come together with lashings of heart and soul. Intended to be heard all the year round, but now I’m looking forward to playing it at Christmas. L’udovit Kochol did the cover painting. From 29 November 2018.

Update from Sylvia Solanas: “If I may, I’m an atheist and so was Summer… Michael carries the faith for us :)”

And from Michael: “Respectfully, I think Summer would call herself more of a soulful agnostic, spiritual but unreligious. Basically Californian. Ha!”

Led by Alexei Tegin, Phurpa are a group of Russian musicians/scholars whose first album arrived on the Invisible Hand imprint in 2007 and have, somewhat impressively, released a further 22 albums, at least 8 of which were also released in 2017. They take what they do very seriously; apparently spending as much time undertaking research as they do observing the musical ritual itself. One previous release, Gyud, came packaged with “special handmade incense”; going the extra mile to create just the right kind of environment for the listener.

“Over 40 minutes of shamanic trance…” the press release assures us. Recorded “…live in the underground 2013, Moscow…” although it could equally be taking place hundreds of years ago – my ears failed to recognise any modern instruments or technology – aside from vocal microphones and so forth – being used. Rituals Of Bön I is a great title; the fact that they researched a type of ancient religion with magical allusions whose name sounds like “bone” just adds to the mystique, at least to Western ears. Indeed, some of the instruments used in this performance are in fact made from human bone.

A typical Phurpa performance usually involves the musicians sitting cross-legged in a semi-circle activating percussion – dungkar seashell horn, silnuven cymbals, damaru human skull drum, kangling human thighbone trumpet – dungchen horns – and throat singing. Their very presence is visually arresting as well as sonically. The group wear cowl robes in a style we would associate with traditional Tibetan garb.

I have here a cd promo of a 12” vinyl release on Zoharum. I believe there is also a cassette version available which features four tracks; the two here on Rituals Of Bön I and two more pieces from another release named Rituals Of Bön II. The two pieces presented here are “yan-drub” and “long life”. “yan-drub” starts with chanting, bells, bone flutes, throat singing. It’s heavy. On first listen, this is a challenging start to proceedings, but as with anything worthwhile, any initial unfamiliarity or uncomfortable responses should be put aside in order to better become open to the work. “long life” involves clashing, clanging percussion, but has a more uniform – you could almost say soothing – approach. I have to say that it is not clear what these rituals are, outside of sitting down making music with traditional instruments. I gather Tegin and company enjoy tea fortified with brandy as part of the performance/experience, but apart from that… For perhaps we are not the main beneficiaries of the performance. It is the group themselves who aim for “transmogrification” by way of performing the music. Which is the whole point of the activity. We are simply witnessing them doing it, and that is all. Having said that, I think it does have the potential to appeal to far more people than just students of Tibetan anthropology or connoisseurs of Ritual Music. Phurpa are stressing the “shamanic” aspects of Bön for the sake of strong marketing probably, but Bön as a religion is still in existence; one way for the armchair anthropologist to tap into it is via podcasts (Bön casts, they call ‘em) at www.doortobon.org.

Harvey’s intention is to deal with the “sound culture”, as he calls it, of religion. We have “material and textual manifestations”, which have survived, and continue to thrive in the culture; I suppose by this he means the fabric of churches, cathedrals, votive objects, paintings, statues, monuments; and of course the printed text of the Bible. But he’s interested in the “audible responses of individuals and communities in action”, what he calls a “lived religion” – the sounds people make at prayer, at worship, reading the bible, sermons. All these things are at risk of vanishing, unless recorded as sound in some way. It’s not his project to reverse this trend per se, by undertaking a comprehensive programme of documentary recording, rather to use this observation as the starting point for his explorations. Accordingly, his source materials include recordings of preaching, singing, prayer, and readings from the bible. He’s taken them from wherever he can find them – radio broadcasts, field recordings, material found on the internet, and gramophone recordings. All of these are raw material for his transformative actions.

On disc one, subtitled “Image And Inscription”, the materials have been organised around an Old Testament story, that is chapters in Exodus telling the story of the Israelites at Mount Sinai, containing elements you’ll already be quite familiar with even if you never read the bible – Moses and the Ten Commandments, the Ark of the Covenant, the golden calf, and so on. On one level, Harvey is creating an “epic” sound-story from his highly abstracted sounds – one full of Old Testament drama, thunder and lighting, the voice of a jealous and patriarchal God. Clouds, mountainsides, howling winds, and stretches of the wilderness are amply evoked by these strange digital drones. Human speech is buried in the suite too, completely distorted and threatening utterances emerging as something alien and near-terrifying. The sound even makes a form of simple music, as of massed trumpets blowing in a supremely dispirited fashion. It’s a powerful and hard-hitting take on a Bible story, bringing its themes to life in a very contemporary fashion.

On a second level, Harvey is also intrigued by the Commandment about the making of graven images – and homes in on this, almost as an ironic counterpoint to what he’s trying to do with the work. He’s acutely aware that he’s making graven images of his own, but doing so without recourse to visual imagery – doing it by sound alone. This refers to a specific part of his process, where printed texts and images of printed texts have been recast into digital form, and remapped into an electro-acoustic composition. But it’s not a transformation just for the sake of process; he’s applying the transformation directly back into an interpretation of the source itself. To put it more simply, a scanned text from the Bible or a sound recording from a sermon is being taken apart, changed, and replayed to respond to the source it’s been taken from.

These themes continue on CD two, but the 13 tracks here are a more diverse collection of recordings made over a five year period, and sourced from a wider range of original elements – recordings of preaching, worship, singing, interviews, and other found recordings. More than one seems to come from recordings of revivalist prayer meetings and worship in the Southern states of America, always a popular source for samples. Indeed at least two pieces here, such as ‘Preach to the Beat’ and ‘The Second Commandment’, are very close in spirit and execution to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, verging on sample-based pop music. Others, making use of loops and focusing on the most emotionally-charged moment of a devotee talking in tongues or at some other peak of religious ecstasy, are not unlike the experiments conducted by Steve Reich in the 1960s, such as Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain. However, for the most part CD2 exhibits a lot of original ideas and interpretations of biblical and religious themes, two personal favourites being a one-minute discourse about demons causing malfunctions in electrical equipment (and how prayer can stop it happening), and the lengthy ‘Erased Messiah Recording’, eight minutes of glorious swishing sounds about which I would love to know more. It’s as though all traces of religious devotion had been annihilated, wiped from the earth, yet still something palpable survives and attempts to shine through on this grey segment of nothingness.

All of this is ambitious enough, but Harvey’s project is continuing to grow even beyond the limits of this double album. The booklet tells you about further sound suites, websites, and exhibitions that further spread The Bible in Translation, which I shall leave you to discover.