WITCH N MONK - Witch ‘n’ Monk

Witch 'n' Monk. The Witch & the Monk. Which, in fact, would be English soprano, guitarist and violinist Heidi Heidelberg and Colombian flautist Mauricio Velasierra. They play a music built entirely on clashing genres and styles, as well as on a taste for throwing the listener off balance. On one side, there's the Latin American soul, bringing with it ancestral rhythms and visions, scents, flavors and echoes of labyrinthine forests - those of people deeply bound to the land, who draw from it the inspiration for a Sound made of flesh and air. On the other side, there's a soul (so to speak) still undecided whether to turn its life into an avant-rock novel or drop everything to devote itself to tending a Voice that moves, without interruption, from operatic inflections to explorations of melodies dipped in the caramel of imagination. The music on these eight tracks is, in short, highly original, and for the duo it marks a step forward from what they offered four years ago on their debut, "We Are Peering Over", released under the name Bitch'n'Monk.

Produced by John Zorn (who welcomed them with open arms onto his Tzadik label), the album opens in grand style with "Escarbando" (special guest Nicolas Stocker on drums), a pout-pourri of Brazilian funk, pop frenzy and jovial avantgarde dreams via Ambitious Lovers. With Seb Rochford behind the kit, "Coal Mine" instead takes the path of a childlike no-wave: the rhythms run riot, voices and electronics chase each other, structuring themselves through destructuring, before the coda throws the whole tangle off balance rather than untangling it. The tropicalist avant-rock of "Self" absorbs, for a few seconds, even a technoid beat, but it's just another clue to a cannibalistic appetite that, on "Pagan's Storm And The Sea Ballad", will push this deliberately shapeless material to mirror itself in folk, only to then abandon it amid the mists of a moor populated by ghosts who entrust their feelings to the voice, while strumming a charango or puffing into patiently carved wooden pipes.

The tango in 13/8 of "The Cage" (driven by Gidon Carmel's mallets) is instead something that the most playful Residents would have loved, without disappointing Rip, Rig & Panic fans either. And while the grooves of "The Gathering" trace back to the magical alchemies of age-old dances, and on "Outchant" even the voices play hide-and-seek with the rhythms, "Gualchován" is driven by a skipping drumbox toward one last evocation of a parallel universe in which Heidelberg's voice and Velasierra's flute share the same mysterious essence.

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09/06/2020