“Live At Issue Project Room presents the immersive, eighty-minute work Blues Alif Lam Mim in the mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis (1434 A.H.), which takes no more than a few seconds to place the listener within a mystical Eastern soundworld teeming with shimmering, tambura-like drones and ecstatic vocal undulations.”
Almost three decades separate these two long-form drone works by Berlin-based Swedish-American composer Catherine Christer Hennix (b. 1948), yet her distinctive voice establishes a clear through-line from the earlier work to the later. In both cases, one witnesses the composer drawing on the sounds of other cultures and traditions, including Japanese Gagaku music and thirteenth-century vocal music. For anyone unfamiliar with Hennix, a few details are in order: an early pioneer in Sweden who used main-frame computers to generate composite sound wave forms in the late ‘60s, she studied with La Monte Young and Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath and led the just intonation live-electronic ensembles Hilbert Hotel and The Deontic Miracle during the ‘70s.
Originally published by Textura.Read it on Textura