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If you like
drumming and percussion (as I do), then this large-scale,
rhythm-filled double CD album is for you. The veteran electronic guru
Steve Roach teams up with shamanic percussionist Byron Metcalf and
numerous other instrumentalists and vocalists to create a sonic
panorama of the shamanic experience. Shamanism is perhaps the world's
first spiritual tradition, sometimes defined as an "archaic
technique of ecstasy" which uses drumming, chanting, and (in
many instances) psychedelic drugs to achieve other states of
consciousness. The
Serpent's Lair
offers listeners a drug-free way to get a glimpse of the shaman's world.
In a way, Steve Roach's work has
been about shamanism for at least the last 20 years; he's been
influenced by this ancient way throughout his career, especially
since he set up his Timeroom in Arizona and worked with Aboriginal
and Native American music. And in true new-millennium fashion, he
pairs the futuristic song of the synthesizer with primal, tribal
sounds. Roach describes his work on this album as "groove
alchemy," "atonal atmos," "elastic electric
grooves," and "lair atmospheres." All this creative
wordplay more or less describes electronic manipulation of percussion
rhythms, whether through textural filters, vast reverberations,
echoes, looping, layering, and other forms of electronic magic. This
is what you will hear throughout the album. The first CD, titled
"The Serpent's Lair," consists of hard-driving drum
rhythms, tied together at times by Steve's floating synthesizer
lines, and other times sinking into those "atonal
atmo(spheres)" that Roach has been working with lately.
A note on the "atonal
atmospheres" by the way: They are at a lower volume than the
rest of the album; deliberately so, as a form of audible rest, but if
you are listening in a noisy urban environment, as I am, they may be
hard to hear. I suggest listening to at least these parts with
headphones, so that you can catch all the little sound-details which
Roach and his collaborators put into these interludes.
The second CD, "Offerings
from the Underworld," is less drum-oriented and more electronic;
it, too, features rhythms but they are subordinated to the
electronics. They range from the railroad-rush of the first track,
"Offering in Waves," to the thudding, low-filtered
"melted Metcalf groove alchemy" of track 4, "Primal
Passage." In my opinion the best piece on this set, and perhaps
the best on the whole album, is the 23-minute track 3, "Cave
Dwellers," which originated in a live jam of Steve Roach and
Jorje Reyes. This evocation of primeval ritual, complete with
wordless Native-inspired chanting, starts slow and builds in speed
and volume to a burning intensity in its last few minutes.
The very last track,
"Ochua," occupies the last-in-the-set position reserved for
a "sweeter" piece on a Roach album. With its crooning
female voice and soft electronic accompaniment, it is designed to
"cool down" the listener after the strenuous session that
has just taken place. There is a distant rumble of shamanic rhythm in
the piece as well, the fading echo of the storm that has just passed.
Hannah
M.G. Shapero 12/31/2000 |
