Vanessa Skantze — Writhing Treasure Feast
As previously mentioned, Vanessa Skantze is a Butoh artist, but also a yoga and dance teacher and active artist in the Seattle area. She was a student of the Jinen Butoh-founder Atsushi Takenouchi and has been performing in the United States and Europe for over twenty years now.
Her work not only shows pronounced attention to detail and emotional intensity but also exciting narrative skills. This is what you can hear through-out the album, as Skantze tells us about the wild beauty, pain, ingenuity, and resurrection of the country, about its people, the creatures and elements of the original America, and dances with the gods of Mexico, North America, and Haiti.
The album opens with the track "Stone" and it’s accompanied by the sound artist Masaaki Masao. It starts with gentle but constantly swelling drones, which expire after about three minutes and paves the way for dark, roaring, and backing-up field recordings. A slowly developing pulsating structure builds up steadily and will soon be devoured by an overwhelming noise. Crackling and rustling cascades mix into the texture and take over the piece with its increasingly lively intensity. You can hear Masao 's background in the fields of ambient to harsh noise wall. An interesting start!
Track number two is "Sea". Here rough structures are seamlessly adopted and accompanied by mystical, celestial chants by the duo Erimanthe. After about two minutes, they break away from the static and are accompanied by heavy, dragging, and doom-like guitar riffs in the background. At the four-minute mark, the voices become more ethereal and angelic-like. The piece slides into a spherical sound structure, where slowly but surely the static sound structures mix cathartically among the songs.
The third piece "Wind" is initiated by a dark drone loop. Slippery, cacophonic elements are added, and different layers of noise and harsher sounds make the piece run into a completely different direction than the two previous tracks. After about ten minutes, feedback gains the upper hand in the different textures and slips over into bell-like structures full of resonance and lets the piece end in industrial sounds ...Pink Void was at work here!
"Fire" begins with beautiful, gently amplified objects and develops into a pleasant soundscape. Only subliminally the drums, played by Greg Campbell, join in and give the piece a tribalistic feeling. Sioux City Pete plays the weird guitar sounds, which sneaks asynchronously and cacophonic into the piece. It swells up almost to the point of intolerability until a pause is taken after about seven minutes, to let the listener breathe deeply. In the second part of the piece, the drums take over and dash ahead. This track really is rather strange.
The following, and a little over fifteen minutes long, track "Serpent" continues the structure of the first three tracks. Heavy, steadily up-building dark drones and subtle placed electronic beats develop into pulsating layers and are transformed into harsh electronic sounds, that flattens out after 7 minutes and usher in the spherical vocals. The artist Morher manages to incorporate a sweep of all elements from the previous pieces. All around!
The last two pieces are accompanied by noise artist Noisepoetnobody. On the sixth track of the album, "Muck", he collaborates with Uneasy Chair. Here, higher noise structures meet strange-sounding amplified objects such as springs or clinking metal parts. The structures are interrupted again and again, detach from each other and then merge into a confused soundscape in which new sounds and objects keep coming in and surprise the listener.
The final track "River" is probably the most emotional piece. Here Noisepoetnobody shows together with the artist Cailleach that a wide variety of musical elements can be created between them. The folk-like sounds skillfully harmonize with each other. In the interplay between the artists, you can listen that they have already worked together and are well coordinated. "River" creates a sad mood, but maintains the tension. Right here I would like to see and feel the associated dance performance by Vanessa Skantze.
Writhing Treasure Feast is an true adventure in terms of sound and concept. Listen to it and surrender it's shifting & darting mood. Only the fourth piece "Fire" stands out a bit and doesn't work in the overall structure, but that's a matter of taste . The pieces "Stone", "Sea" and "River" are highly recommended to give them listening. The album was released on April 10th via Scry Recordings and is available both digitally and as a double CD. It comes with a 72-page book with photographs, prints, and original texts by Skantze.