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Ketil Bjornstad / David Darling
Epigraphs
(ECM)
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by Mark Mauer
I normally put on an ECM record with a pretty clear preconception of what I'm going to hear, and I'm rarely surprised by what I hear inside. There are notable exceptions, one of which is Eleni Karaindrou and Kim Kashkashian's soundtrack for Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze. Naturally, this view is purely subjective.
That said, this is an absolutely gorgeous hour of slow piano and cello that avoids the pitfalls new age music easily falls into. No songs to the whales or laments for indigenous people here...This music seems firmly rooted in the modern world; though it's easy to recognize the detached Northern European influence. It is languorous without ever being lethargic. A few of the tracks were written by pre-Baroque and Renaissance composers (William Byrd, Guilaume Dufay) which makes the timeliness of the sound that much more unexpected, but the originals serve much more than just interludes between the sixteenth century composers. Bjornstad's piano immediately sets the tone for the album only to hand off the lead immediately to Darling's lead cello in "Upland." By the time we get to "Song for TKJD" you realize that there's got to be a layering of the cello going on, but it still sounds natural and like something you could be watching live in some sonically perfect Oslo concert hall.
Much of Epigraphs sounds as if it could be part of a European film score, and in fact Darling's deep cello has been used in recent films of Jean-Luc Godard. But the music never has to jump through the hoops of action and conflict that film scores must, and that is one of the great strengths of the record. The shifts in mood are obvious, but they're nearly microtonal in nature, so that you're never stuck in one place for too long, but you're never jostled about too far from where you want to be. This is one of the best mood-setting -and mood-settling -- albums I've heard since Aphex Twins' Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, and that's high praise indeed.
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