{"title":"Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"azure-4","title":"Azure","description":"\u003cp\u003eHaving each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with diverse touchstones of cross-cultural expression - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang return with Azure, their third full-length with Ideologic Organ. Among their most ambitious outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the Spring and Summer of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority draws upon the traditions of Persian ghazal, Korean poetry, Dhrupad, Javanese music, free improvisation, and numerous others, culminating as a singular gesture of contemporary Minimalism that glacially unfolds across the length of the LP.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Hailing from the Pacific North West, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of American experimental music since their emergence during the mid 1990s, each producing some of grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years. Kenney is an experimental vocalist, composer, and teacher, focused on the transformative powers of the voice and sound’s relation to mystical experience. In addition to her collaborations with Oren Ambarchi, Tashi Wada, Avey Tare, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Davachi, Ensemble Nist-Nah, Sunn O))), and numerous others, she is known for her performance of Indonesian vocal music (sindhenan) and Persian vocal music (radifs), as well as her own compositions drawing on elements of both. Kang, a composer and multi-instrumentalist who is highly regarded for his unique approach to the viola, has worked extensively across numerous fields, appearing on albums by Bill Frisell, Joe McPhee, Sun City Girls, Wayne Horvitz , Ikue Mori, Laurie Anderson, Aki Onda, John Zorn, Blonde Redhead , William Hooker, Animal Collective , Lou Reed, Oren Ambarchi, and numerous others, as well creating as a striking body of solo works that incorporate elements of his Icelandic, Danish and Korean heritage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA hypnotic return to Kenney and Kang’s unique expression of “unison music”, Azure is among the the duo’s most paired down and minimal efforts in more than a decade. It’s five composition are underscored by allusions to the natural world and drifting temporarily - “like a haze of light across the sky. The morning followed after watching the moon, then the sea” - producing a profound calm that rises in arcs of tonal colour.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The album’s opener, Eclipse, is a composition built around the phrase “inside the eclipse”, drawn from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s novel, Dictee, and follows the Korean American writer’s suggestions of method and technique. Leaving aching silences between each utterance - Kenney’s sparse vocal interventions mirrored by Kang’s delicate viola tones - the piece’s collective elements produces a remarkable tension, bubbling within its spacious calm.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title track, Azure, takes its name from a pun on the Persian «az u» or «from them”, and is a meditation on the closing rhyme of ghazal 413 from the Divan of Hafez of Shiraz, az u (from\/of them), râh az u, âh az u, “the moon from them, the path from them, the sighs from them”. Imbued with sorrow and release, across the piece Kenney’s vocals and Kang’s viola weave and dance against a shruti drone, calling forth echos of lost moments in far off worlds.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is followed by three pieces that incorporate traces of disparate cultural traditions into their forms. Ocean is an experiment with different intensities of pulsation, inspired by Korean sung poetry and Kagok playing, the Indian Classical techniques of Dhrupad and gamak, and ring modulation’s use of two simultaneous frequencies - in this case one being agreed upon and the other improvised - which assemble an enveloping expanse of intoxicating harmonics and vibrato. For Forest Floor, Kenney’s long-tone vocalisation play on the meanings of ‘tan’ or body, and ‘nur’ or light, ‘Chegel’ and ‘Khotan’ from ghazal 327 of the Divan of Hafez, and the Javanese names of pitches and associated body parts. Dancing at the boundaries of sorrow and joy, her voice, paced in perfect harmony to Kang’s viola, seems to propose alternate realities of what ecstatic music might be. The album’s final piece, draws upon Glenna Cole Allee’s book, Hanford Reach, incorporating words spoken within by by interviewees living or working in the tribal territories of Wanapum, Yakama, Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and many others, on or near the Hanford Nuclear Site, in the state of Washington. Among the album’s most dynamic and powerful efforts - drones and pulsing tones playing counterpoint to Kenney’s soaring vocals - the duo, inexplicably, imbues impressions of the Pacific Northwest with numerous creative touchstones that blur perceptions of both culture and time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith each of Azure’s discrete expressions, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang ask us to hold\/stop\/wait\/listen at the edges of knowability, allowing the world continues around us, as they draw us into realms of audibility where breathing and blinking might meld with each tone and join the sonorous landscape being formed before our ears. A startlingly gesture of contemporary experimentalism and minimalism, Azure pushes us to find a deeper rhythm; to move, grow, and form our listening bodies towards each composition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ideologic Organ","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50394269647179,"sku":"2053327","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50394269417803,"sku":"2053325","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Azure_7c1bc503_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726435339"},{"product_id":"ajaeng-ajaeng","title":"Ajaeng Ajaeng","description":"\u003cp\u003eTo be heard with ears half bent, or with one side facing what Maryanne Amacher calls \"the third ear\". The great reverence in which the Tanpura is held by Indian classical music, its transcendental but occulted place in the tradition alongside its normal function as a drone, made a strong impression on the composer such that it has taken decades to formulate even a simple Tanpura Study. The fundamentals, the Om, as well as the overtones, the music of the spheres -all these have their valid rights, but in Tanpura Study they are embedded in a series of gestures, what I call signatures, on the melodic level. In Tanpura and Harpsichord, there is an encounter of overtones with chords braided into pun-notes, what Gerard Grisey calls \"degrees of transposition\". Taken together, this amounts to a non-spectralism in which, contrary to first impressions, there are no fundamental frequencies, even in the bass. Ajaeng Ajaeng: with respect to European string instruments, the technique col legno affords the direct encounter of wood and string, opening the way to a more tactile conception of the sustained sound, while bringing the materiality of the bow and its practices into question.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn violin, viola, cello bows, Pernambuco wood offers an ideal example of extraction, colonialism, deforestation. With the Ajaeng, a Korean musical instrument, the situation is more complex. The dialectic of court to folk music, always political, always incendiary, may be heard here in the encounter of forsythia and silk, of Dae Ajaeng to So Ajaeng, and on a broader level of Dang Ak (Tang Dynasty music) to Hyang Ak (native Korean music) and their representations. Alternating music and sound, overtone arrays mingled with noise, marked by the bow change, in flamelike patterns which flicker, emerge, and fade again. A slow down structure, also formalized in Time Medicine, seems to produce a long decrescendo, with the technique of the players drawing out the flicker patterns in a kind of game. The point here is not to produce a drone but to delve into the question of life in sound. This apparent emergence of life is due to the apparatus, what Marx calls a \"social hieroglyphic\", which brings forsythia and silk together in technique, cultivated by practices which are themselves sustained by the real relations of student to teacher to student. The recording engineer too, by placing one mic below and one above each Ajaeng, bifurcates the listening space; the mix, one Ajaeng in each speaker, again produces a bifurcated image of the sound. Thus the sound is split in four directions, to be reconstituted in the cochlea, but with the center of the body as the real target. This music is made for meditation. On retreat in 2019 I had a revelation: there is no difference between the prayer, the hearing, and the void. There is nothing original in this idea; Wonhyo and many sages have thought it before.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Editions Mego","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP | x2","offer_id":50461388865867,"sku":"1098722","price":31.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/34e3f212-111d-4a58-9f09-d9bd984cae0a_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727247644"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/jessika-kenney-and-eyvind-kang.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}