ERIKA DAGNIN TRIO - Sides
SLAM Records: SLAMCD 557
Erika Dagnino, poetry, voice; Ken Filiano, double bass, effects; Satoshi Takeishi, percussion
Just 8 months after the recording of Signs, reviewed a year ago, the trio replaces the quartet and with only voice, double bass and percussion succeeds in producing an album, Sides, that is in no way diminished by the reduced input – if anything, it might even be considered more elegant, more motivated: more awe-inspiring. While Italian and English words are used to express the same ideas, so do the poetry and the music discuss the cultural implications of sounds upon words. There seems to be a sort of metamorphosis from the composite sounds into the new meanings of the contemplations directed towards the listener, or perhaps drawn by the listener from those deliberations.
This transmutation in turn reflects upon the notion that there may be a point to be made about musical emotion and analytical understanding – yes of course there is a difference, but is it important? Should we ignore one in favour of the other?
The words are paraded through the work with a physically powerful deliverance and ingenious cadence that lend them a seemingly incipient autonomy, taking them out of the world of ordinary meaning. This transformation is also applied almost in reverse in Track 5, where the poet recites a set of numbers as laid out in a 7x6 matrix in the booklet which accompanies the CD. This piece is reminiscent of the Number Poems of Neil Mills, written in 1969 and published in 1971 by the Arts Council of Great Britain as part of Experiments in Disintegrating Language (33 AC 1971 mono Side 1).
Neil Mills wrote in the sleeve-notes: "I believed that the meaning which emerged in the reading of poetry lay primarily in intonation and rhythm and only secondarily in semantic content, i.e. that what was important was how something was read, rather than what was said – the human voice functioning as musical instrument."
Mills also thought that "numbers provided a very limited range of spoken sound-values", but here Erika proves him wrong and it is the elegance with which she addresses the tool which is her voice that enables her unsettling annunciation.
Here is another exquisite album from the voice and pen of Erika Dagnino, the hallucinatory bass playing of Ken Filiano and clarity of expression brought by Satoshi Takeishi's Japanese percussion.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
SLAM Records: SLAMCD 557
Erika Dagnino, poetry, voice; Ken Filiano, double bass, effects; Satoshi Takeishi, percussion
Just 8 months after the recording of Signs, reviewed a year ago, the trio replaces the quartet and with only voice, double bass and percussion succeeds in producing an album, Sides, that is in no way diminished by the reduced input – if anything, it might even be considered more elegant, more motivated: more awe-inspiring. While Italian and English words are used to express the same ideas, so do the poetry and the music discuss the cultural implications of sounds upon words. There seems to be a sort of metamorphosis from the composite sounds into the new meanings of the contemplations directed towards the listener, or perhaps drawn by the listener from those deliberations.
This transmutation in turn reflects upon the notion that there may be a point to be made about musical emotion and analytical understanding – yes of course there is a difference, but is it important? Should we ignore one in favour of the other?
The words are paraded through the work with a physically powerful deliverance and ingenious cadence that lend them a seemingly incipient autonomy, taking them out of the world of ordinary meaning. This transformation is also applied almost in reverse in Track 5, where the poet recites a set of numbers as laid out in a 7x6 matrix in the booklet which accompanies the CD. This piece is reminiscent of the Number Poems of Neil Mills, written in 1969 and published in 1971 by the Arts Council of Great Britain as part of Experiments in Disintegrating Language (33 AC 1971 mono Side 1).
Neil Mills wrote in the sleeve-notes: "I believed that the meaning which emerged in the reading of poetry lay primarily in intonation and rhythm and only secondarily in semantic content, i.e. that what was important was how something was read, rather than what was said – the human voice functioning as musical instrument."
Mills also thought that "numbers provided a very limited range of spoken sound-values", but here Erika proves him wrong and it is the elegance with which she addresses the tool which is her voice that enables her unsettling annunciation.
Here is another exquisite album from the voice and pen of Erika Dagnino, the hallucinatory bass playing of Ken Filiano and clarity of expression brought by Satoshi Takeishi's Japanese percussion.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
