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 Idiosyncratic
as hell, Al Margolis' music must have told something strange to the mind of
some director at WDR Köln Radio, commissioners of the American composer
in 2006. Upon hearing the material, the liners explain, they stated that it
sounded too "new music-y", deciding against broadcasting it. Did these
people really believe that If, Bwana would supply them with a neo-classic score?
As Mr. Wilson said, god only knows. The CD features two compositions, both based
on Lisa Barnard's utterances. The title track, subdivided in four movements,
was generated by a 16-minute improvisation that AM/IB "duplicated and extended";
then he gave different tracks to
flutists Jacqueline Martelle and Jane Rigler to interact with, assembling all
the parts in a nightmarish patchwork complete with electronic treatments of
Lisa's vocal trips. The result is a mix of XX century avant-gardism and lysergic
atmospheres, a dissonant sinuousness that could be difficult to digest for newcomers,
certainly not for those in the know of the author's artistic consistency throughout
an unlikely career. It works even better at whisper volume, functioning as a
series of ghostly presences that seem to come out of the remote corners of a
room accompanied by delirious tweets and gurgling moans. The final and shorter
selection "Issue" sees Barnard and Margolis alone - voice cum electronics
and processing. It's a gorgeous piece, halfway through the lamentation of my
cat Jerry when his stomach suffers after eating a rat (I'm not kidding: he emits
a modulated "oyoyoyoy" that verily recalls fragments of this work)
and a drugged meeting of
yodelling muezzins about to fall into convulsions. What I love most in this
man's oeuvre is exactly the eternal suspension between intense experimentation
and the will of trying solutions that no academic institution will ever accept
as "serious". Needless to say, for this reviewer "academia delenda
est". - Massimo Ricci
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Al
Margolis/If,Bwana - An Innocent, Abroad (