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Artist.....: Simon Wickham-Smith
Album......: Love & Lamentation
Type.......: Album
Genre......: Electronic
Style......: Ambient / Experimental
Label......: Pogus US
CatalogNr..: POGUS 21048
Url........: http://www.pogus.com
Rel.date...: 18.06.2008
Str.date...: 00.06.2008
Source.....: CDDA
Grabber....: EAC 0.95 beta 3
Encoder....: Lame 3.97 -V 2 --vbr-new
Quality....: VBRkbps / 44,1kHz / Joint-Stereo
Tracks.....: 5
Size.......: 63,91 MB
Length.....: 73:50
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Tracklist
01. Simon Wickham-Smith -Sandokai 18:39
02. Simon Wickham-Smith -The Kin-kindness of Beforehand 12:30
03. Simon Wickham-Smith -love&lamentation I 15:52
04. Simon Wickham-Smith -love&lamentation II 12:48
05. Simon Wickham-Smith -love&lamentation III 14:01
Total Time: 73:50
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Release Notes
Simon Wickham-Smith was born on the south coast of England in February 1968
and graduated from King1s 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.
The Sandokai ("The Harmony of Difference and Equality") is a prayer written
by the eighth century Japanese Zen teacher Sekito Kisen. The basis for this
piece was a tape given to Wickham-Smith by a nun of a recital at her
monastery. He 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 he 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 have been stretched and pitch-shifted beyond (immediate) recognition;
to the ears they have melded into something that seems at once both ethereal
and solid.
The Kin-kindness of Beforehand grew out of his "Multiple Tongues" project, a
series of pieces in which Wickham-Smith exposed the spoken word in many
different languages to a series of digital manipulations. The Kin-kindness of
Beforehand is divided up into several distinct sections, each of which took on
a particular persona during its creation. For the composer, this was the most
complex of all the "Multiple Tongues" works, because he wanted to use specific
strings of words and the quality of writer Rachel Becker1s voice somehow to
comment on each another.
love&lamentation started life as a setting for voice and electronics of part
of the biblical Book of Lamentation, but it quickly became clear that the
literal setting of words was not going to convey the melancholic intimacy that
needed to be expressed. As a teenager Wickham-Smith had heard Alain
Gheerbrant1s wonderful ethnomusicological recordings of a blind Turkish
troubador and had fallen hopelessly in love with his voice and exquisite
playing of the saz. About the same time, through his friend Richard Youngs, he
had discovered also the ex tempore psalm singing of the Scottish Isle of
Lewis. Fifteen years later, he decided that these two could be made somehow to
work together to show the love and lamentation which he felt they both held in
their deeper recesses, and which he wanted to present in this new piece. The
result is a strange melée of feelings, repetitions and textures. From time to
time we hear a somewhat bizarre percussion sample, which he 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. Veysel1s 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 waySand die slowly away into the distance at the close.
____________________________________________________ Psychedelic Cyber Zone __
est. 2001