It’s a fitting title. I dischi di Angelica seem to have been on hiatus for a few years but returned with some new releases in 2019. The label, dedicated to recordings of live gigs from the AngelicA Festival in Bologna, has put out a succession of eclectic and surprising discs, the latest of which is an absolute pearler. aaangelicaaa may 10th. 2015 captures a gig on said date by the Zipangu Ensemble, a small orchestra of string instruments playing one half-hour piece each by Charlemagne Palestine and Cassandra Miller. That may seem an odd pairing at first (although Palestine must be used to it) but both share a trait of messing with your head, big time. Palestine does it overtly, while Miller is more insidious.
Strummmmminggg for Stringggggsss N Thingggggsss is a reworking of of Palestine’s venerable Strumming Music from the early 70s. If you’re familiar with the string ensemble version of the piece included on the Sub Rosa reissue Strumming Music then you will not be fully prepared for this. Palestine begins solo, keening in falsetto over rubbed glasses; the strings come in lower pitched, with cellos and basses augmenting the violins. The heavier texture, with Palestine’s singing, creates a rich, complex drone that swells and heaves and, just as it seems to be dying away, is joined by prolonged rolls on a pair of tubular bells. There’s a manic energy in the sound and the gesture from the orchestra that matches Palestine’s solo performances.
Miller’s piece, A Large House, was written for string orchestra and is played here by a smaller ensemble. A bass drum rolls underneath the strings as they play a slow, descending glissando. The orchestra slides down, and down, and further down. Then they keep descending. An endless Shepard tone made rough and ragged by the strings, it simultaneously falls, collapses and sinks. When you think it can’t go any further, it just ploughs on remorselessly. Listening through it is like being caught in one of those looping panic dreams that never resolve, with that giddy sense of dread and perverse exhilaration. It has the psychoacoustic trippiness of the best drone while acting as an aural Rorschach blot for the listener’s subconscious. Cranked up loud, it is a face-melting experience.
The live recording sounds great; my only niggle is that the applause is left in at the end of each piece, when it could have been set aside as separate tracks.
