Well I
was listening to the Stones
but with all due respect to the solemnities of Sunday, I’ve trashed that idea and am now listening to some rather more off the beaten track music by
Darius Jones. This a cappella song cycle is titled
The Oversoul Manual and features the vocal quartet
The Elizabeth-Caroline Unit (Amirtha Kidambi, Sarah Martin, Kristin Slipp & Jean-Carla Rodea). The work has really grown on me for some reason.
If you like any of the music of the “free atonal” sort, say Marie’s lullaby or other lyrical bits of Berg’s expressionist opera
Wozzeck, you might really like this album. But here you must also not mind that you won’t have a clue what they’re singing about, no matter what your native language may be. As far as the lyrics’ invented language goes, it will help to have had some solfège training. No doubt it helped the vocalists, and that may have been the point of some of the vocabulary and grammar revealed in the lyrics.
Still, even having the digital booklet that comes with the album will leave you pretty mystified, so just prepare to be immersed in the music itself. The work purports to be the revelation in a sacred language of the birthing ritual of a new being. This is an extension of ideas in Darius Jones’ trilogy
A Man’ish Boy but it’s a departure from the variously more jazz/funk based approaches he takes there.
There’s a reason why, in the West, we sometimes call the tritone (an augmented fourth, like A-D#) the devil’s tone. You can get so you like hearing it after awhile but for Western-trained musicians, it can still be the very devil to hit and hold against the base tone for more than a beat in passing, even if you have perfect pitch. Similarly with adventures like the vocalists singing their lines against each other in
The Oversoul Manual. The singers are all just amazing.
The work was performed at Carnegie Hall in October of 2014. There are some little vimeo clips of Darius Jones and the quartet talking about the work, here’s one of them:
http://vimeo.com/107541978
For a little more insight into the actual story in the
Oversoul Manual piece of the
Man’ish Boy saga, try this
review at Pop Matters. We’re talking spiritual sci-fi here. Whatever, it works for me as a Sunday listen.
