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Pogus 21048
Simon Wickham-Smith
love & lamentation
1 Sandokai (2001)
The Sandokai (“The Harmony of Difference and Equality”) is a prayer written by the eighth century Japanese Zen teacher Sekito Kisen and recited daily in So¯to¯ monasteries. The basis for this piece was a tape given to me by a nun of a recital at her monastery. I forget both her name and that of her monastery, but I think it has been twisted sufficiently for identification to be impossible.
If I remember correctly now, six years later, I wanted to create of this sample a prayer without borders, a follow-up to an earlier work, Ave Regina Caelorum (2000, released on Extreme Bukake [VHF65]), in which I used the Latin plainsong of a prayer to the Virgin Mary in much the same way.
The organ sample at the end is from a piece by Erik Satie, whose spirituality was equally strange and eclectic. All the samples, of course, have been stretched and pitch-shifted beyond (immediate) recognition, to my ears they have melded into something which seems at once both ethereal and solid.
2 The Kin-kindness of Beforehand (2003)
voice and text: Rachel Becker
The Kin-kindness of Beforehand grew out of my “Multiple Tongues” project, a series of pieces in which I exposed the spoken word in many different languages to a series of digital manipulations. I met Rachel Becker, an American poet, when we were both living in Oxford and she agreed to read some of her poems for me to use in a piece.
When she heard the final product, however, Rachel was initially very unhappy with the way in which I had presented her material. So I put the piece aside for a year or so until she gave me permission to release it to a wider audience.
The Kin-kindness of Beforehand is divided up into several distinct sections, each of which took on a particular persona during its creation. For me, this was the most complex of all the “Multiple Tongues” works, because I wanted to use specific strings of words and the quality of Rachel’s voice somehow to comment on each another. I don’t feel that this goal has in any way been achieved, but I do feel that what resulted in any case is an elegant and, for me at least, a moving set of linked portraits.
I would like to thank Rachel for trusting me with her poems and for allowing me to release this piece on CD.
3-5 love&lamentation (2004)
love&lamentation started life as a setting for voice and electronics of part of the biblical Book of Lamentation, but it quickly became clear to me that the literal setting of words was not going to convey the melancholic intimacy that I felt needed to be expressed.
As a teenager I had heard Alain Gheerbrant’s wonderful ethnomusicological recordings of the blind Turkish troubador As¸ik Veysel S¸irso˘glu, and I had fallen hopelessly in love with his voice and exquisite playing of the saz. About the same time, through my friend Richard Youngs, I had discovered also the ex tempore psalm singing of the Scottish Isle of Lewis. Now, fifteen years later, I decided that these two could be made somehow to work together to show the love and lamentation which I felt they both held in their deeper recesses, and which I wanted to present in this new piece of mine.
The result is a strange melée of feelings, repetitions and textures. From time to time we hear a somewhat bizarre percussion sample, which I had first worked on in 2000. Part 3 opens with an offcut from an unreleased (and now never-to-be-released) piece from 1999 called Deaf Piano. As¸ik Veysel’s voice starts the piece and revolves through Part 2 in a kind of hippy trance love-in fashion. The congregation from Lewis sing their melancholy in a sparser and maybe wilder way…and die slowly away into the distance at the close.
love&lamentation was originally written for a tour of the United States in 2004. It was performed in New York, San Francisco (to an extremely unimpressed audience) and, finally, in Houston. I originally thought it succeeded in everything it intended to do; then I heard it too frequently and became bored; now I feel again that it is a good piece, and that Part 3 can easily stand to be played on its own.
Simon Wickham-Smith was born on the south coast of England in February 1968 and graduated from King’s College, London in 1990 with a degree in English Literature. Whilst at university, he met Richard Youngs and from that meeting developed a friendship which has produced more recordings than he cares to remember. As a solo performer, he has played in Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Holland, Lithuania, the UK and the US and his work has been released on labels in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. Not satisfied with making music, he has also been a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition, and is also a translator and scholar of Mongolian and Tibetan literature. ( wickhamsmith@gmx.net )
Thanks to Rachel Becker, Emma Fitzpatrick, Keith Jebb,
Al Margolis (naturally) and Richard Youngs.
Mastered by Tom Hamilton
CD design by Matt Schickele
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