2023 - Poland
Chamber Music, Ashkenazi Music, Nigun, Chamber Jazz
The music you will hear in this album comes from ancient times. « Nigunim » comes from Hasidic Judaism traditions and is supposed to contain lyrics, because they are meant to sound like prayers. But here Bastarda removes the words in order to tell an even more detailed story. The title of the album, Nizozot, refers to « sparks » of holy light that are within everything, in all matter. Nizozot is a birth divided into three acts. The first one is about love coming to our world, it’s Modrzyc. The second one is about that love spreading in our world, it’s Szapiro. And the final act, Koznic, is about all humans and every forms of life living in the world filled with spirituality. But there’s something else in Nizozot, it’s the end of the world. If you know Hungarian filmmaker Belà Tarr, you’ll be familiar with how art can anticipate the end of the world and our global extinction. In his final film, The Turin Horse, we follow a couple and their horse living in a remote house, while the world around them and within them slowly disappear, until the very nothingness invades the frame and all that remains is silence. The power of an album like Nizozot is that the music you hear shakes the sparkle in you in order to make you feel your own mortality. And that tour de force, they achieve it for one specific reason: the quality of the recording.
It’s been a while since I hadn’t heard such an extraordinary recording and mix. Three instruments, all playing very very low, Pawel Szamburski’s clarinet, Michal Gorczynski’s contrabass clarinet and Tomasz Pokrzywinski’s cello. And their breathing. You can feel the wood of every instrument, the wood, the wind going through the clarinets, the tensed strings of the cello. Matter. Music as matter turns the experience of this album into something very particular. Because you can hear the origin of the music itself. Nizozot. You hear every note that is birthed and every note that is killed. You hear the musicians breathe, as if they all were reinsufflating life into their instruments. If the music is the life, and silence is death, listening to Nizozot feels like a constant struggle between those two entities. When everything goes quiet, fear owns your body while you’re contemplating emptiness and the risk that, maybe, the breathing will never start again. But relentlessly, even when drone textures come in in the most minimalistic way, the musicians keep going. Even when the darkness feel the space during the final act, you can hear the smallest details, hoping that life will prevail. And… does it ? Time for a journey.
Amaver is the introduction. As you can notice, there are no percussions. There won’t be any. The rhythm won’t be easy to get, the patterns, same. It’s always dark in Bastarda’s world, always low. Low frequencies, quiet and discreet, earthly frequencies flirting with airflows. Then the beauty rushes towards the end. There are two paces in Amaver, the death drives and life drives, the two paces shaping this album. On Omar, the beauty is subtly framed by the clarinet, giving us some time to enjoy the melodies jsut before drone textures make their etrance in the beginning of Mame. That’s also the kind of music they play, textures of low instruments, rough but aerial, a constant dialogue between the earth and the air, between the clarinet and the contrabass clarinet. And there’s always the second side of the coin, Mame gets playful in the second part like a reminiscence of more traditional Ashkenazi music. The peak of the album si reached on the third song, Emes. A beautiful tension. Melodramatic but never baroque, never overflowing, closer to modern classical and post-minimalism than somthing else. Here, the build-up of the contrabass clarinet sounds like a cry in the night. Sheer beauty of a tender trio moving forward in the mysterious night.
Achar continues on this tensed wave. And by the ending it gets more threatening. It’s not the fear that impacts the music. It’s the music that impacts the fear. On marching orders, hinting at what the third and final act will sound like. Hopefully, Modzitzer is lighter, as if the previous tension enabled the musicians to let go off an important weight. And that feeling goes on with Kulom where the clarinet meets virtuosity in a fast paced melody. The first act is about to end, Leyaakov and Ledovid, two wonderful chamber music pieces where all three instruments get their moment to glow, while always letting the silence join in to participate. With the second act, Szapiro, the opening song Sheomrim almost feels hesitant. Uncertainty. An uncertainty rapidly dismissed by Leartsenu where the clarinet starts moving like a snake and the contrabass clarinet sounding like a percussion taking us on a much more clearer path. More aggressive yes, but more lively too. This second act is all about trying to reach for the beauty. That’s what they temporarily achieve on Yerushalaim, lighter. But right after, because nothing lasts, Moshe takes you to some of the roughest places of the album. Of course there’s beauty in the notes that are held by the musicians but, somewhere else, fear is back.
The second act ends with Ata going straight to your emotions. This time, the cello is more present in the melodic line and gives an almost melodramatic feeling to the composition. You reached maximum distance in playfulness. The second act is over. The only thing that remains is Koznic, the final part. A breathing, a voice singing in the background. It sounds like an excerpt from a recording session where the musicians were preparing their instruments with an open window and someone outside, singing. On Adir, the breathing is here to encapsulate the drone textures. In the background, you can hear it, deep breath to blow the clarinet, to give birth to the textures. Something that could be a triangle rings in the end, like a ring of crystal spreading some light in these dark landscapes. Because right after, on Hakafot, the threat is back. Each composition is slower than the one before. Life is still here but is more than ever threatened to be reduced to silence. Three musicians fighting death. Things get worse on Khasal, there are less notes than ever. The cello resonates in the void left by the other instruments. It feels like anytime the organic could be replaced by lifeless electronic devices. The triangle is back, but it doesn’t feel as reassuring as before.
It sounds like an alert.
On Hamalekhim, with the contrabass clarinet, it feels we’re getting even lower. So low, so deep in the ground, beneath the roots of the trees, where everything is dirt. There’s no more life, everything’s a rock. Cold. But there is one song left. Avdi. Is the world over ? Has life ended ? The first notes sound… a bit light. Are the instruments smiling ? Yes it does sound like they are smiling. It’s lighter, clearer, we breathe again, we left the rocks for the grass. We are back from deep down underneath. Alive, breathing. It’s calm, the breathing is calm. After this great darkness, the very small dose of light that is Avdi sounds like the greatest gift possible, a gift for being alive, for choosing life upon death. When Nizozot is over, for the first time, for the second time, for the third time, you always come back with new thoughts. It’s like an active meditation in musical movement. But not an everlasting moment. An ephemeral movement. And when you go back to Nizozot, it means you will once again face this great darkness, you will look at the end of the world in the eyes and, at the same time, you will feel all those sparkles of beauty around you. The struggles remain, and because we can face death, it means we can feel life.
It’s been a while since I hadn’t heard such an extraordinary recording and mix. Three instruments, all playing very very low, Pawel Szamburski’s clarinet, Michal Gorczynski’s contrabass clarinet and Tomasz Pokrzywinski’s cello. And their breathing. You can feel the wood of every instrument, the wood, the wind going through the clarinets, the tensed strings of the cello. Matter. Music as matter turns the experience of this album into something very particular. Because you can hear the origin of the music itself. Nizozot. You hear every note that is birthed and every note that is killed. You hear the musicians breathe, as if they all were reinsufflating life into their instruments. If the music is the life, and silence is death, listening to Nizozot feels like a constant struggle between those two entities. When everything goes quiet, fear owns your body while you’re contemplating emptiness and the risk that, maybe, the breathing will never start again. But relentlessly, even when drone textures come in in the most minimalistic way, the musicians keep going. Even when the darkness feel the space during the final act, you can hear the smallest details, hoping that life will prevail. And… does it ? Time for a journey.
Amaver is the introduction. As you can notice, there are no percussions. There won’t be any. The rhythm won’t be easy to get, the patterns, same. It’s always dark in Bastarda’s world, always low. Low frequencies, quiet and discreet, earthly frequencies flirting with airflows. Then the beauty rushes towards the end. There are two paces in Amaver, the death drives and life drives, the two paces shaping this album. On Omar, the beauty is subtly framed by the clarinet, giving us some time to enjoy the melodies jsut before drone textures make their etrance in the beginning of Mame. That’s also the kind of music they play, textures of low instruments, rough but aerial, a constant dialogue between the earth and the air, between the clarinet and the contrabass clarinet. And there’s always the second side of the coin, Mame gets playful in the second part like a reminiscence of more traditional Ashkenazi music. The peak of the album si reached on the third song, Emes. A beautiful tension. Melodramatic but never baroque, never overflowing, closer to modern classical and post-minimalism than somthing else. Here, the build-up of the contrabass clarinet sounds like a cry in the night. Sheer beauty of a tender trio moving forward in the mysterious night.
Achar continues on this tensed wave. And by the ending it gets more threatening. It’s not the fear that impacts the music. It’s the music that impacts the fear. On marching orders, hinting at what the third and final act will sound like. Hopefully, Modzitzer is lighter, as if the previous tension enabled the musicians to let go off an important weight. And that feeling goes on with Kulom where the clarinet meets virtuosity in a fast paced melody. The first act is about to end, Leyaakov and Ledovid, two wonderful chamber music pieces where all three instruments get their moment to glow, while always letting the silence join in to participate. With the second act, Szapiro, the opening song Sheomrim almost feels hesitant. Uncertainty. An uncertainty rapidly dismissed by Leartsenu where the clarinet starts moving like a snake and the contrabass clarinet sounding like a percussion taking us on a much more clearer path. More aggressive yes, but more lively too. This second act is all about trying to reach for the beauty. That’s what they temporarily achieve on Yerushalaim, lighter. But right after, because nothing lasts, Moshe takes you to some of the roughest places of the album. Of course there’s beauty in the notes that are held by the musicians but, somewhere else, fear is back.
The second act ends with Ata going straight to your emotions. This time, the cello is more present in the melodic line and gives an almost melodramatic feeling to the composition. You reached maximum distance in playfulness. The second act is over. The only thing that remains is Koznic, the final part. A breathing, a voice singing in the background. It sounds like an excerpt from a recording session where the musicians were preparing their instruments with an open window and someone outside, singing. On Adir, the breathing is here to encapsulate the drone textures. In the background, you can hear it, deep breath to blow the clarinet, to give birth to the textures. Something that could be a triangle rings in the end, like a ring of crystal spreading some light in these dark landscapes. Because right after, on Hakafot, the threat is back. Each composition is slower than the one before. Life is still here but is more than ever threatened to be reduced to silence. Three musicians fighting death. Things get worse on Khasal, there are less notes than ever. The cello resonates in the void left by the other instruments. It feels like anytime the organic could be replaced by lifeless electronic devices. The triangle is back, but it doesn’t feel as reassuring as before.
It sounds like an alert.
On Hamalekhim, with the contrabass clarinet, it feels we’re getting even lower. So low, so deep in the ground, beneath the roots of the trees, where everything is dirt. There’s no more life, everything’s a rock. Cold. But there is one song left. Avdi. Is the world over ? Has life ended ? The first notes sound… a bit light. Are the instruments smiling ? Yes it does sound like they are smiling. It’s lighter, clearer, we breathe again, we left the rocks for the grass. We are back from deep down underneath. Alive, breathing. It’s calm, the breathing is calm. After this great darkness, the very small dose of light that is Avdi sounds like the greatest gift possible, a gift for being alive, for choosing life upon death. When Nizozot is over, for the first time, for the second time, for the third time, you always come back with new thoughts. It’s like an active meditation in musical movement. But not an everlasting moment. An ephemeral movement. And when you go back to Nizozot, it means you will once again face this great darkness, you will look at the end of the world in the eyes and, at the same time, you will feel all those sparkles of beauty around you. The struggles remain, and because we can face death, it means we can feel life.