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Eyvind Kang - Narrow Garden (2012)

Eyvind Kang is not the type to repeat himself. To come to grips with the music of the prolific American composer, arranger, and violinist, you would need to sift through upwards of 50 albums, each with its own secret but palpable internal guidelines. (Lots of them have to do with "NADE," a Sanskrit word with a number of obscure connotations that has a mysterious significance for Kang.) And you would have to range far beyond the composer's own works, through those of Laurie Anderson, Sunn O))), Mike Patton, John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, and many other hard-to-classify artists. To generalize, Kang refracts strategies from global classical, jazz, folk, and experimental music though his esoteric personal interests, which are always changing. He's a musical polymath who writes in his own voice instead of self-consciously "crossing genres." Boundaries are aren't smashed, but simply ignored, dreamily melting away.
The Narrow Garden features an exotic array of strings, winds, horns, and percussion, performed by an international cast of more than 30 musicians from three different ensembles. Written at home, on an island near Seattle, but partially recorded in Barcelona, the record purports to explore the medieval concept of courtly love. We all know that "explores the concept of" often boils down to "mentions in the liner notes," but you don't have to strain too hard to hear Kang's intricate weaving of soft, romantic consonances and harsh, anxious dissonances as an expression of the quicksilver joys and miseries of formalized desire. Taking in lyric poetry, Western choral music, Middle Eastern and South Asian modes, and "ashugh" singing (a popular folk tradition heavily associated with the Caucasus), The Narrow Garden features some of the most sunny and flowering music that Kang has created, seamlessly joined with a couple of sinister threnodies. If the Middle East-tinged jazz of Wyatt, Atzmon & Stephen's For the Ghosts Within had been aggressively produced by Svarte Greiner, it might have come out like this.
At one extreme, there are ravishing compositions of deceptive simplicity, which accumulate delightful embellishments. These include "Pure Nothing" (a sultry setting of a Guilhem IX poem translated into English by W.S. Merwin) and "Forest Sama'i", where a serpentine melody seems to hover over Eastern and Western classical modes without alighting on either one; the playful variations unfold until the song abruptly takes flight in a scherzo-like dance animated by trembling whistles. At the other extreme are the title track and "Usnea": dense, metallic braids of screeching strings, ear-spearing flutes, and other distressed timbres. Kang knows how to sculpt and compress clashing harmonies until they take on an inviolable collective form, like a perfect cube of mangled cars fresh from a compactor. But the best thing about the record's tonal variety is how neatly it all blends together, especially on epic closer "Invisus Natalis", where a fleet of guitars, basses, strings, and bassoons taper down to a liquid cacophony, dissolving all of Kang's thought-provoking musicological contrasts into a flawless, golden glow.