Penumbra
Gamelan Alligator Joy
Songlines (songlines.com/release/penumbra)
Founded in 1990, Gamelan Alligator Joy is a Vancouver area composer-musician collective here represented by 13 musicians. Fifteen years in the making, Penumbra is its third release. During that time five longtime composers of the group – Michael O’Neill, Mark Parlett, Sutrisno Hartana, Andreas Kahre, Sam Salmon – kept busy composing and workshopping new works.
Seven new compositions for Javanese gamelan gadhon are featured, exploring the expressive potential of gamelan to render “a multiplicity of emotions and thoughtscapes.”
The opening track, Hartana’s Bahureksa, incorporates instruments and songs from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi skilfully blended with Javanese gamelan, plus solo and choral sections. As a Javanese-born gamelan player, teacher and composer in Canada, Hartana’s inspiration is culled from his own extensive cross-cultural musical journeys.
Parlett’s Dice Over Easy superimposes his minimalistic rhythmic, structural and harmonic language onto Javanese tonal modes and performance practices. His compositional strategy here features instruments timbrally outside the gadhon’s tuned and untuned percussion. An example: high keening suling slendro solos. Softly plucked strings of the ukelin (a rare hybrid zither) also meander across the soundscape, while occasional fretless bass lines add the frisson of surprise.
Peregrinations in Palindromnia is Parlett’s through-composed meditation for gadhon, driven by the eloquently dramatic poetic narration by DB Boyko. Spare music and text evoke aspects of place, transience, death and return in the natural world, finding solace in a sense of suspension.
Salmon’s terse 96 Tiers references the 1966 proto-punk song 96 Tears, yet musically it quickly develops into a richly sonorous process piece, divided into 96-beat sections. 96 Tiers also pays homage to early minimalist music – roots of which were coloured by gamelan.
Don’t adjust your playback volume: Kahre’s Let N = N requires musicians to play instruments with their fingers, dispensing with typical mallets. This focus on delicate tactility extends to the bowed string rebab melodies sensitively played by Hartana woven through the gauzy percussive textures.
O’Neill’s ambitious 15-minute Mode of Attunement features a prominent part for retuned piano dynamically rendered by Rory Cowal in dialogue with the gadhon. O’Neill cautions that it’s “not a concerto for retuned piano, [but rather it] artfully explores subtleties around integrating the two forces.” A totally unexpected yet effective outsider instrument here is the jaw harp, outlining piano rhythms in one movement. The work takes us on a “nocturnal journey in 11 episodes filtered through hypnogogic consciousness.”
O’Neill’s Grotto: Ventriloquial Investigations on the other hand is a Beckettian spoken-word mini-opera with O’Neill voicing both himself and Seamus, his wisecracking baritone puppet. Adapting original and borrowed texts, it’s set in an underground grotto evoking both Plato’s cave and Jung’s unconscious. We hear songs, jokes, instrumental gamelan interludes and philosophical sparring, all “circling around the ultimate unanswerable questions.”
Penumbra stands as Gamelan Alligator Joy’s latest statement of its long commitment to creating new music beyond the received borders of Javanese gamelan genre, style and approach. Both an eloquent summing up of Vancouver’s gamelan founding generation and a collection of accomplished postclassical music looking to the future, Penumbra represents a high-water mark on Canada’s gamelan-centred music shores.
