Sojourn - Lotus Mind

Dreamscape 4761

The prospect of another platter from the duo of American sarodist Lisa Moskow and Swiss multiinstrumentalist Hermann Buhler seemed a pleasant one. I’d quite enjoyed an earlier Dreamscape venture by the duo—a meditative but quietly adventurous melding of ancient and modern improvisational practice. It was fairly dry but immediate, at times even just a bit dangerous.

Would that were the case for this newest release. Don’t get me wrong—it’s gorgeous! The recorded sound is vivid, the acoustic is rich and hugely ambient, and the playing is polished to the extreme. Buhler’s tone is full and round; Moskow’s playing is even more subtle than before.

I see the disc’s failure as a result of the disconnect between conception and execution. The Dreamscape website is touting it as a meditation piece based on traditional ragas without a conscious attempt to render them in traditional fashion; perhaps this is the problem. While my understanding of Hindustani music is very limited, this recording seems to be missing any sense of tension/release, both of more “authentic” Indian classical recordings and of more recent trends in improvised music. Instead of highlighting certain pitches of the scale by tantalization and return, tones float effortlessly over a drone, seemingly without any other purpose than the achievement of bliss. Buhler’s wonderful multiphonics are nowhere to be found here, and the whole project is too redolent of the “new-age” trope that the earlier disc avoided so cleverly. While pleasant at the start, the seamlessly connected group of pieces soon becomes long, first inducing relaxation and then some gentle but forgettable dreams. It’s too bad that a project with such promise had to be executed in such a generic fashion.

~ Marc Medwin