The second solo album of Danish-Iranian experimental percussionist – composer Jaleh Negari, known from the bands Selvhenter and Pinkunoizu and as a co-founder of the musicians collective and label Eget Værelse, suggests evocative impressions of her travels. Negari processed her field recordings from her visits to Indonesia (Gunung Kidul and Yogyakarta Java), Iran (Ghalat Village Shiraz, kelardasht forest and Deh Banafsh Mazandaran) and Denmark (Forbrændingen, Albertslund and Glyptoteket, Copenhagen), altered these atmospheric soundscapes into graphic notations and then converted these scores once again into new music. She also did the cover painting.
«Weaver ~» highlights the interdisciplinary essence of Negari’s creative work, as it offers a series of fascinating aspects of translation and transformation, from field recordings into graphics and into new sounds, or as she calls it: Edit-In-Recorder (E.I.R.). Negari says that she wanted to sharpen our natural ability «to engage in conversations with trees, buildings, streets, stones, machines, plastic cups, fossils and shells. I think that communicating with each other begins with the act of listening». The inspiration for the music of «Weaver ~» is equally found in the science fiction of Jean ‘Möbius’ Giraud’s’ «World of Edena» (1990) and Ursula Le Guin’s «The word for world is forest» (1972) as well as in works from the world of contemporary electronic composition.
The nuanced transformations gravitate into organic soundscapes, carrying something familiar with them, but with a distinct, timeless ambiance and natural sense of flow. The imaginative usage of processed percussive instruments – singing bowls and woodblocks plus speech samples, introduces a mysterious ritualist dimension to «illo tempore» and «simorgh», adds a cinematic narrative to «differences in kind» and «the harvester», and cements «opening pattern» inside vintage space-prog music. Negari turns «memory of the world» into hypnotic meditations and «cluster of knots» into a clever dance piece that integrates percussive elements from Indonesian gamelan music. Slowly, these carefully layered soundscapes accumulate into an enigmatic, almost psychedelic sonic journey, that sings its very own special, haunting songs.
Later this year, the material from «Weaver ~» will be part of a solo exhibition by Negari on Akademiet For Åben Lytning (Academy of Open Listening) in Odense, Denmark. In this exhibition – installation the mutual exchange between sound, performance and graphics will be approached in the same manner as the communication that takes place in the underground fungal networks, which connects the trees with other organisms.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jaleh Negari (dr, singing bowls, perc, p, v, synth). Jeppe Brix, Alexander Holm, Anders Bach and Mahzad Sinai (sounds and words)
