Ottmar Liebert & Luna Negra
"Opium" two CD setA few things attracted me to this CD when I saw it in Tower Records at a listening station just outside the "soundtracks" section of the store and near the world music section. First, the title: people don't call things opium without at least some pretension of bending your mind. Second, the soulful eyes of Ottmar Liebert staring out of the swirling colors on the cover. Third, it was at a listening station, and I was waiting for someone, so... I put on the headphones.
What I heard was a lush mixture of flamenco guitar with ambient synth. Oooooo.... I liked it. I went to another track. Middle-eastern drums tapped softly from another world while the finger-picked nylon string stylings continued. I was hooked.
Even better (?) it was on sale, a two CD set for something like $19.99. Sold. I brought it home, and Disc 1 immediately became a fixture in the CD player. Disc 1 is entitled "wide-eyed" and Disc 2 is "dreaming"--as you might expect, wide-eyed is more lively, while dreaming is more ambient, with many of the same musical motifs recurring, but not in a contrived "sampled" sort of way. This is masterfully crafted music and composition, each track connected to the last but unique and growing.
Some time later I hear Ottmar Liebert's first album, a more straight-up classical/flamenco-style guitar recording called Nuevo Flamenco, and learned that he is a half-Chinese, half-German born in Cologne and now living in Santa Fe, who started classical guitar training when he was 12 years old. My impression of that album was--it was too smooth. But it is exactly this smoothness that make Liebert the perfect instrument of expression when coupled with the ambient interior mind trips of Luna Negra.
Recently I picked up another O.L.&L.N. project, a CD of remixes done by rave djs of London, Germany, and the US. Entitled "Lush" this six-song e.p. has, as one might expect, back beats and samples, and the guitar is sublimated into the mix more, but it is a pleasing listen. It doesn't approach the artistry of "Opium"--the remixes have a slightly contrived feel to them. But it doesn't suck.
You can find Luna Negra with their own web site at www.lunanegra.com with intriguing tour journals, music samples, etc... plus "Armchair Flamenco" a flame-war about how OTtmar isn't "real" flamenco... (who the fuck cares? those people, apparently.)
You can also get a Mac demo of the "Opium" CD, which has some CD-Rom multimedia content (I've never actually looked at it) from http://www.musicfan.com/ecd/details/86.html
An Altavista search turns up hundreds of links on the name "Ottmar Liebert" so there's plenty of interviews and other stuff to find out there.
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.
How does this guy write so convincingly about Americans of varying backgrounds, ethnicities and locales, with such utter surety about Venice Beach and Las Vegas? I don't know, but I know nothing really about Tim Powers except that I saw him briefly at the World Fantasy Convention where this book won the annual award. It well deserves it, too. Here's a world just like our own except the ancient mysteries of kinghood and queenhood are still alive, passed down from the Tarot to modern day poker, where superstitions, luck good and bad, and Fate are real working magic for certain individuals who, for whatever reason, are fighting to become kings and queens. This is a truly extraordinary book. I am going to guess that some people will find it distasteful, difficult to follow, or lacking in likeable characters. But I'm an editor, and I tend to cut any very well-written book some slack, so I kept reading, and soon realized I was in the grip of a forcefully unique narrative, one which I then enjoyed thoroughly to the end. I even began to like some of the characters. This book is hard to describe without giving away surprises. The only other book I can think of which comes somewhat close to it in flavor is Lewis Shiner's "Deserted Cities of the Heart."
Rock and roll, contemporary fantasy, an estranged father and son, this is my kind of book. It begins when a middle-aged stereo-repair guy, after his father's death, discovers he has the strange ability to visualize and imagine rock songs that were never recorded and make them play forth from his stereo. This description doesn't do justice to the power of the moment when Ray, avoiding thinking about his father, starts thinking about what could have been if the Beatles hadn't done certain things, and imagines what certain songs might have sounded like... and suddenly he realizes he is not hearing it in his mind, but coming from his speakers. What ensues is not a rough and tumble adventure. At no time is the Fate of the Universe or the history of mankind at stake, which is a refreshing change from the urge of most science fiction and fantasy. No, what follows is a difficult journey in Ray's inner mind: outwardly he is going through marital problems, traveling to the spot where his father died, making bootleg recordings, while inwardly he is struggling to come to terms with his own youth, his lost youth perhaps, his own thwarted attempts at the rock and roll life, his own inability to form close attachments, the aging of his generation and the changes in America and the culture around him. This is the kind of depth absent from much contemporary fiction, even non-genre fiction which is afraid to confront any issue too directly unless it is autobiographical. Maybe there is some autobiography in "Glimpses"--I don't know, and I don't think it matters. This is, like Tim Power's "Last Call" (reviewed above), a unique narrative that deserves to be experienced for its own sake.
This is a first impression: after about fifty pages of Expiration Date, I get the feeling I've been here before. In "Last Call" to be exact. The parallels are striking: a title implying finality, a separated brother-sister pair, occult signs and portents with real meaning, a loner who drives a van, settings in Venice Beach and in the western desert, magical power causing cars to stall (in Last Call it caused them to start their engines), a forty-ish male main character who had been living a happy mundane life who finds himself dragged back into long-unfinished occult business of some sort in order to save his life, a boy character alone against the conspiracies of the world, and lots of extremely seedy characters with bizarre personality quirks. I have a feeling the resemblance will end there, though, and thus far the familiarity of the territory has not kept he book from being equally entrancing, suspenseful, or well-written as the previous. It makes me wonder in the back of my mind if, in a few more books, if Tim Powers won't run this stylistic well dry, much the way Roger Zelazny did, but why worry? I've got plenty still to read in this book, the magic here does seem to be a completely separate thing from the Tarot/poker stuff of Last Call: here it's more to do with eating ghosts. I'll say more when it is finished!
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