C I R C L E T
P R E S S
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I've been trying to come up with a way to describe this ever since I first heard early mixes of it at Blue Forest Farm where it was completed. I'm reduced to stringing oxymoronic adjectives and disparate references together like this: Laurie Anderson does Dead Can Dance with a dash of David Sylvian and Adrian Belew thrown in. Contemporary, ambient but grounded, full of world music but wholly European in concept (a full Latin Mass) and full American in execution, spiritual without seeming the slightest bit religious, three-dimensional in a way that music does not usually exist... This technique of description, though, completely fails to convey the unity and singularity of this as a work. The mass is a consummation of the talent, ability, and aesthetic of a singular artistic mind. The mass is full of elements, influences, samples, and yet it never feels like a collage or a paste-up job, it never feels random or the slightest bit derivative.
I think the form of the mass helps this. It provides form and structure that Davidson is able to pour his artistry into like a mold. The text is set, the work "cut out"--leaving the most crucial part, the music itself, all that is left to be created.
I know, I know, but what does it *sound* like? It doesn't sound like any mass you've ever heard before, I would bet. Here I am reduced to naming off vaguely similar things: like Peter Gabriel's "Passion" but not at all "soundtrack-y," a little like some of the less strident Dead Can Dance, but not the slightest bit "goth." It's good, it fills up the mind and ears, it gives one a sense of being in the presence not of god but of the great unspoken something that music is our closest approximation of as human beings. Pretty darn cool.
-ctan |
