Akira Rabelais, whose very name evokes images of Renaissance alchemists
poring
over cryptic texts of mysterious rituals and angelic evocations, uses
home-built
software with very Borgesian names like “Evisceration Reanimation,
Morphological
Disintegration,” “the Lobster Quadrille” and “Argeïphontes Lyre” to
give
ethereal life to faded voices lifted from dusty reel-to-reel tapes. While
performing archive work on old Ampex tapes, Rabelais discovered a treasure
of
Icelandic accapella ballads performed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Seduced
by the haunting heartbreak of these voices, he embarked on an ambitious
project
to give these faded and dying voices new life. The result is
Spellewauerynsherde, a record of ghostly voices that hover on the
periphery of
thought and perception.
Some of the voices are treated and some are presented in their rarified and
naked
state. The lengthy track titles hint at other mysteries (and may only be
intended as archival notes to be deciphered by Rabelais himself), but a
title
like “1559 W. Cuningham Cosmogr. Glasse 125 Within which draw an other
Circle, a
finger bredth distant.” will take you longer to say than to listen to its 44
seconds of unadulterated lamentation. “1390 Gower Conf. II. 20 I can noght
thanne unethes spelle that I wende altherbest have rad.” becomes a duet, the
soloist’s lament rising above a mist of transparent voices as if her
accompaniment is nothing more than the looped echo of her own voice (in
RabelaSpellewauerynsherdeis-speak this would be the result of a “time domain
mutation”).
The centerpiece of Spellewauerynsherde is the 21-minute “1483 Caxton
Golden Leg.
208 b/2 He put not away the wodenes of his flessh with a sherde or shelle.”
The
voices become insubstantial specters, ghostly choirs drifting back and forth
across an endless featureless landscape. There is no fixed point, no
anchor, and
we are set adrift in a sea of harmonic tonalities, flooded with the
elongated
purity of these simple songs. There is an organic drift to these voices as
if
the Collective Unconscious has embarked on an iterative exploration of the
infinite possibilities of tone and timbre.
Spellewauerynsherde is a record which exists outside of time, a
collection of
plainchants rescued from medieval obscurity by the pristine digitization of
the
21st century and transformed into a ephemeral brume of sublime inflections.
Highly recommended.
Spellewauerynsherde is out now on Samadhi Sound.
