Chandan Narayan - Eight Vignettes for Solo Autoharp

Simple Geometry

Chandan Narayan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science of the University of Pennsylvania researching acoustic phonetics and also an expert in Sanskrit, manages to find time to freely improvise on the autoharp as well. A member of Glass Plates (with Jeffrey Allport and Robert Pederson) as well as a collaborator with violinist Angharad Davies, Narayan here presents eight brief improvisations on an instrument you don’t come across to frequently in this neck of the woods, the autoharp.

The pieces are entirely acoustic although each is approached using extended techniques of one sort or another. There’s more bowing and scraping than there is plucking and Narayan seems to enjoy particularly serrated sounds, the sort of result you might derive from drawing a nail rasp across the strings. Occasionally, echoes of its more traditional resonances can be heard, hanging ghostlike in the air for a couple of seconds but they’re quickly dispersed by the more earthly tones rising from worried metal and wood. Sometimes, the technique employed gets in the way of the piece as such, obscuring sounds themselves, attracting too much attention; other times, it passes unnoticed. It’s these latter moments, as heard on the first track (all untitled), that are the most successful, where the music just floats out there, a bit mysteriously. We’re not in Laraaji territory by any means, more akin to that inhabited by Ms. Davies’ brother, albeit without an e-bow. Another musician I found myself thinking of was Alfredo Costa Monteiro, who demonstrates a similar brand of visceral, physical attachment to his instrument. For myself, about half the time I thought the miniatures worked, about half I felt there was something lacking although I will say that the more I listened, the more I tended to fall under their spell. That missing something may simply be a collaborator and I’d be very interested to hear Narayan working in tandem with one or more fellow musicians; I get the feeling he’d be a fine listener.

As is, “Eight Vignettes for Solo Autoharp” is more in the nature of a sampler laying out propositions from Narayan, observations on the nature of his autoharp, on its own inherent phonetics. It’s an intriguing set by a musician from whom I’ll be curious to hear more.

Those interested in the disc (a CDR) can contact Narayan directly at cnarayan@sas.upenn.edu