The legendary Harlem-based free improv collective, once John Fahey's
favorite band and now an inspiration for free-folk experimentalists, are
back with their first full-length album in three years, a tangled mix of
dark-toned textures and crypto-mythologies. These strung-out rituals and
slow-tempo'd meditations carve otherworldly landscapes out of mutated
string saws, shaken percussion and electrically altered guitars,
layering mood on anxious mood and stretching musical ideas into droning
mantras. Drawing inspiration from gothic horror novelists like Algernon
Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and H.P. Lovecraft, Qvaris has the
phosphorescent glow of an interesting nightmare — frightening, mysterious
and somehow compelling.
The album begins with the mystic shuffle of "The Doon," the faraway tramp of
drums giving shape to echoing string notes, plucked and bowed, and a
funereal rattle of maracas. Inward-looking, almost claustrophobic, the cut
implies communion of a nonverbal, elemental sort among musicians, perhaps
creating, perhaps merely discovering its ritual layers and textures. It
feels like a mindful meditation, one where the players allow the music
to be what it is, to proceed, to flow, in a conscious but
unmeddling sort of way. With "Live Your Myth in Grease," the pace
quickens, with rhythms that dart and redouble, staccato high string riffs
playing tag with lower guitar sounds, everything dancing like loose pebbles
atop the vibrating skin of tribal drums. It is long at eight minutes, yet more
sensual than the first track. It seems abstractly Middle Eastern, like a
belly dancer painted in Cubist style. There is a howling, feedback-fueled
breakdown with quivering electronic notes floating above like fever images
— and an audible, though altered, voice. It is the first quasi-human sound
you hear on the album. The album becomes even more unfathomable with "The
Black Pope," a nightmarish miasma of organ wails or accordion wheezes, with
muted bowing adding urgency. These are tortured, lost and spectral sounds
without perceptible time signature or key, and they evoke haunted rooms and
squeaking floorboards, with violins howling like spirits and fear rising in
the density of sawed strings and vibrating organ.
There are four separate tracks that share the CD's "Qvaris Theme," starting
with the cut so titled and running through "Qvaris Theme (Loplop
Hearing Qvaris)," "Qvaris Theme (Wohihb)" and finishing with "Vaticon Blue
(End of Theme)." These four linked compositions share an unearthly high,
bowed melody, some sort of altered string sound I think, set against
various combinations of jingling, pounding or shaken percussion. "Qvaris"
seems to be a character in this suite of songs, and the name is close
enough to the Latin quaeris to suggest a searcher of some sort. The sounds
themselves suggest the deep silence of space, interrupted only by alien
high tones that reverberate and overlap, and perhaps create a dialog between
themselves.
The "Qvaris" songs are tantalizing, but ultimately unreadable. Far more
accessible is "Boreal Gluts" with its urgent, spaghetti beat and slashing
guitar figures, alongside the twitches and surreality of the earlier
material. Later on, "Lugnagall" pulsates exuberantly on tom tom and shaken
percussion rhythms. The faintest trace of jangling strings starts in the
interstices, growing gradually stronger, along with bright organ tones and
yelped vocals. The guitars are most blues-ish here, muted picking
suggesting the elusive link between Fahey and NNCK.
Qvaris isn't an easy album, and you have to listen hard, to
participate almost, to appreciate its drawn-out grooves and
atmospherics. However, once drawn in, you can feel how hard the players
are listening to one another, how their improvisations extend the emerging
contours of each song, how the mood and texture take shape out of a shared
consciousness. If you listen hard enough, you almost become part of that
consciousness, and that's when Qvaris starts to speak most clearly
to you.
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