Lately, I've been watching a BBC series called How Music Works. The title says it all, really -- it's a program designed for laymen, explaining how musical methods came about and how they've endured. While entertaining no matter your familiarity with its subject matter, the show is most worthwhile when cleverly juxtaposing historically unconnected, seemingly disparate pieces of music. In this context, you start to grasp similarities in the work of Haydn, Philip Glass, Coldplay, and pretty much anyone else you could imagine. For me, though, seeing such clear musical common ground reminds me of other, insurmountable distinctions between old and new, classical and modern.
On the surface, the main divide between popular modern and popular classical music is one of complexity, but when we boil music down to its base elements, then a major chord is still a major chord, right? Well, it would be nice to think constantly in that strain, but so many other cultural facets work to obscure music's shared, timeless ingredients. In the here and now, it takes the right kind of album to bridge that cultural divide, an album like Eyvind Kang's Athlantis, which is a timely work steeped in classical tradition.
I've often missed modern composition's presence in record store culture, so Athlantis is an admitted breath of fresh air. The album is released on Mike Patton's Ipecac label, which will inevitably expose it to a younger demographic and allow it to be grouped and sold alongside current "fringe" artists like Ikue Mori and John Zorn. I wouldn't compare Kang to Zorn, though; he's not an obtuse or particularly radical composer by any means. His willingness to use clear harmony and form alongside sound experiments permits him a curious underground niche. Here's an artist not confined merely to one realm of musical culture and thought.
Collaborations with Animal Collective, Blond Redhead, Bill Frisell and Mr. Bungle, and many others appear on Kang's resume, but with Athlantis, we find him immersed in his own compositions, most of which are based on haunting choral figures. Each piece is brief, but the work is clearly unified, containing evenly dispersed musical elements and themes that form an overarching whole -- again, Kang operates within the classical tradition.
Interestingly, much of the album's character is derived from its specific instrumentation. If the choral parts which dominate the album were performed in a more familiar way by more familiar instruments, a completely different character would emerge. That might sound painfully obvious, but think: how often do we actually hear the human voice intoning as it does on Athlantis? Vocalists Patton and Jessika Kenney deliver lead counterpoint melodies, singing spiraling, often sustained lines in a foreign language -- a method associated almost exclusively with classical music. For the average listener, the pure "sound" of the voices will make or break Athlantis.
In addition to the vocals, horns, percussion, and stringed instruments appear in various combinations throughout the record, their pairings acting as thematic compositional devices. For instance, the combination of plucked guitar and thick male/female harmony that first appears in "Andegavenses" reoccurs in "Repetitio," and "Ministers of Friday," the opening track, shares its horns with "Concilator." Kang employs this method generously throughout the out, creating various tonal connections between different segments of the work. These repeating timbes serve as a unifying element removed from the actual written material.
The sections of Athlantis are also emotionally conjoined, not through regimented themes and variations, but through each piece's general tone. Kang has a specific but diverse harmonic range, moving from minimal beauty to Ligeti -nspired dissonance. And though is formal training is apparent, so is his seasoned sense of restraint. Indeed, repeated listens reveal economy at nearly every turn. In both Kang's harmonies and his experimentations, the album's pervading unity is unique, its greatest point of disconnect from the works of likeminded artists.
Where Kang connects to his contemporaries and his forebears is in his observation of music as a craft, something learned and refined as much as felt. Athlantis represents a point in a certain history of sound, and it's best quality is that it makes you want to discover all the points before it.
More about: Eyvind Kang
