Jeremiah Cymerman — Sky Burial
With its use of a 'doomy' muted ashy palette and general bass-heavy amplifier driven unease, it is one of several releases I've heard within the last few years that occupies the boundary between blackened ambience and instrumental avant garde. Though it was released by 5049 records, it would not be out of place of Utech Records.
The album opens with a thick sub-bass tone that would be inaudible on many systems. Around the pulsing sound of this tone are scattered sounds of creaking wood, unruly snakes of distant feedback. The low-mid range atmospheric smog keeps the pacing of the piece from climbing out of sluggishness; the slow heat of the piece is believably tropical.
A similar bass drone propels the second track, "Rogyapa", and cements an immediacy / constancy that virtually never exists in free jazz. The washed out, grainy white of mid-range guitar feedback can be heard through the second half of this track. Much like 'TV snow', it is an easy sound to hallucinate pictures into, as the mind will naturally draw shapes, and hear ghosts of remembered things. Cymerman is clearly fascinated by distortions, their artifacts and imperfections, and the way they mask and blend timbres. If this is not a fascination you share, it's not likely you'll enjoy this album.
Jeremiah plays clarinet as a primary instrument, and can be heard anxiously tonguing breathy, toneless staccato notes, or using Colin Stetson-esque circular breathing patterns to create strange, desperate loops. He reluctantly throws the listener a bitter, fear-stricken melodic fragment here and there, as if struggling to find the space for music within a hostile and threatening environment.
At times, the music is gestural and powerfully primitive in its unrestrained bleating. At others, too many recordings have been layered and the sound is merely an abrasive, amorphous blob. In general, this is a well produced recording, with a full of range of sound sources, and clever use of panning and analog effects and to create ebb, flow and space, but there are parts that were overworked, and overdone, and others that are aimlessly sparse. In general, the music has no particular trajectory, and is more like a kind of meandering trek.
Though there is plenty to like about the texture of the sound, I find the cacophany of clashing tones grating, directionless and non-resolving. I must admit that as I get older, I have less patience for such ceaselessly tense and austere soundscaping; it's all too unapologetically grim and ugly for my taste. There must be some element of human pleasure, some faint megalomania, as with a vertigo inducing creation like John Zorn's "Absinthe" or Lustmord's "The Place Where the Black Stars Hang". The embattled, 'nowhere to run' feeling of this album is only slightly cathartic. It has little function in my life, yet perhaps serves its intended purpose perfectly, giving voice to the tumultuous and chaotic forces of nature, and recalling an existence in which survival was far less a guarantee. If you count bands like Borbetomagus or TenHornedBeast among your favorites, investigate this, but otherwise, certainly listen before you buy.