Beñat Achiary - The Seven Circles

FMP 128

Two years have passed since the premature passing of Peter Kowald. His departure was sudden, the rift left by his demise deep. Testaments to his stature, tribute projects continue to trickle into circulation. Die Like a Dog’s Never Too Late, But Always Too Early, the four-bass choir’s performance at Victoriaville captured on After You’ve Gone are but a few of the aural wreathes erected in his memory. This recent FMP release represents one of the latest emblems of esteem.

The extent of Beñat Achiary’s connections to Kowald aren’t explicated much in the album’s notes- the pair used to perform together in a Kurdish café in Wuppertal- but their friendship was such that he felt fit to pay homage at the Music Unlimited XVI Festival in early November of 02, mere weeks after the bassist left the planet. Achiary’s recital opens with an invocational recitation in French, beyond the scope of my meager linguistic capabilities to comprehend. The remaining nine tracks weave improvisatory vocals with spoken texts and percussion played on clutch of small percussion and bamboo pipes of varying sizes and diameters. Achiary’s borrows liberally from the poetry of Gherasim Luca and the prose of Jon Mirande, Federico Garcia Lorca and Josean Artze for the sung passages. Applause is uniformly absent from each track.

Working his cheeks like bellows and using his palms as baffles Achiary presses choppy streams of air through tightly pursed lips. On “Pansori for Peter” the resonances in his throaty ululations recall the basic dynamics of throat singing. Not the otherworldly pitch control of Tuvan strains, but a more primitive and coarse hewn terrestrial variant. At one point his garrulous glossolalia sounds like a strange cloning of an agitated Kabuki character with a chanting Navajo shaman. Towards the close he places some sort of membrane covered hand drum over his mouth to create droning overtones. “Chant D’Exil” joins soaring Cantorial-like singing to the tether of a brittle fluctuating drum beat. His voice turns lilting and fragile for “Pigalle” bobbing atop a spidery lattice of djembe tones before suddenly breaking into boisterous scat.

Affection for this set will largely hinge on listener embrace of Achiary’s quixotic vocal style. He rarely seems content to stick with one vernacular or method of enunciation and frequently romps all over the phonetic map. Clicks, clucks, stutters and sputters constitute a regular part of the ad lib libretto. For me it took some acclimatizing, but clicked on the second trip through. The percussion is frequently incidental, save on tracks like “Harvest Song” and “Nuit Sans Sommeil” where friction-fed drones underpin other free-associative bouts of oral acrobatics. On the latter Achiary delves into a deep African American spiritual groove.

Like its source of inspiration this music adopts a free range perigrinary spirit without equivocation. As Achiary aptly and poetically notes Kowald’s absence is a presence, an entity that will exist for many years to come.

~ Derek Taylor