HOME I RECORDINGS I CONTACT I SHOP
....................................................................

The Cryonic Chants
KML 2113

PRESENTATION

Chants, rather than songs form the melodic base of this concerto, because they better express their alien, or in some verses, their sacred origin: animal writings.
The letters making up the lyric phrases were actually chosen by a she-goat indicating the notes with her muzzle as she stood on a carpet laid down on her pasture and marked out with alphabetic symbols.
This method of composition shaves any poetic form down to ground level; or rather it reformulates it from the smallest linguistic unit, which is the letter.
The letter is a sound that needs a meaning, when it is taken as simply part of a word, but here it takes upon itself the entire density of the language yet to come. It contains within itself something of the power of the atom, something able to merge together light and darkness.
Chiara Guidi has harvested the clusters of letters gleaned by the goat, forming them into new words, which are structured exactly as “old” words, laden with meaning, the tools of poetry.
The lexicon of this language cannot be found in a book, but in music that is capable of reaching back down to the origin of the word, to the unity of the single letter.

The electronic-acoustic music of Scott Gibbons blows inside and outside the letters, like a bellows igniting those phonic and cosmic sparks that are the faculties of an order of discourse.
Gibbons and Guidi have composed the chants in a language that is utterly foreign, from another Earth, from another time and from another being, while continuing to use a human syntax.
The musical setting of the chants, in diatonic polyphony, is based predominantly on human sources, but the anthropomorphic component is indiscernible.

The result is a majestic symphony that unfolds over ancient harmonies and syncopations, offering flashes of a previous future. The blending and interrelationship of Gregorian and twelve-tone forms, the concerto’s precise mathematical proportions together with its metres and accents that cancel out isomorphisms, all combine to make this concerto an adventure in sound and in time.