Eva Polgar & Sandor Valy — Gilgamesh

This professionally assembled package, on Ektro Records, comes dressed in very stark black and white robes. The thick booklet comes with two mini-essays by the protagonists and one photo of them playing together; the rest of the pages are made up with “QR” codes - those square “barcodes”. These codes, also to be found on the front cover, reveal sections from The Epic Of Gilgamesh when scanned (or rather, I have to assume they do: the front cover reveals text and two later ones reveal Polgar and Valy’s websites - in between, I had difficulty scanning…). The album has twelve pieces, all (bar one) piano-dominated; amounting to nearly an hour.

The first track, “Prologue”, is a very short spoken-word piece; quoting from The Epic Of Gilgamesh - thereafter the minimalist looping repetition begins and rarely drops. “Gilgamesh” is an album of insistent, piano-driven minimalism. Reading between the lines in the two mini-essays, Valy seems to have sent ideas to Polgar, derived from the text itself (possibly sonified - its unclear); which Polgar then played with and improvised around, on the piano, passing the results back to Valy. He then pieced everything together into the constructions on the album. I think this is a key point, because thats very much how the album sounds. My first thoughts are to visualise it as blocks on a DAW, shapes on a computer screen. It sounds somewhat cold and detached, “unmusical” - despite its very best efforts. Even when it attempts to “overload” the listener - the fury and bluster of “The Bull”, for example; or the orgasmic moans of “Shamhat” - it struggles to garner any emotional response from me, or create any real “atmosphere”. Perhaps the sole affecting track is “Ishtar”, which is very noticeably also the only piece on the album played in realtime on a piano. This effectively conjures a mysterious, eerie tone - something the remainder of the album largely fails to. I think this is down to the greater dynamic awareness and potential that “Ishtar” displays - the more constructed pieces suffer from everything following a similar line: volume, timbre, etc.  Even when the elements become distorted in the final track, “Back To The City”, the piece never really takes off, or hits home. Complimenting the album’s piano, are lines of brass/woodwind and choral voices; as well as subtle, effective processing - but, again, none of these truly lift the tracks. To repeat myself, there is this sense of the release as an almost “robotic” layering of loops; interlocking cleverly, but not generating any emotive response. 

This is a curious release to my mind. The booklet texts suggest a very high-brow musical venture, packed full of ideas; but the audio itself is frankly flat and uninspiring. Its not irredeemable - “”Gilgamesh - The City” would make a fine horror soundtrack - but it remains cold and unengaging to my ear. However, it has made me want to read The Epic Of Gilgamesh; which is a victory of sorts.