amelia cuni-melopea lp

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Black Truffle presents Melopea, two new pieces highlighting the incredible voice of Amelia Cuni (1958-2024), the great Italian singer, based in Berlin in later life, whose mastery of the classical Indian dhrupad developed in parallel with a commitment to contemporary experimental approaches. After two stunning archival releases documenting traditional dhrupad performances in India in the 1990s, the two side-long pieces here embody the freedom with which Cuni explored new contexts and settings for her singing. Both make use of a long recording of Cuni singing the pentatonic Raag Bhoop (or Bhopali) made in 2012 by her partner Werner Durand in Berlin. Melopea began from Cuni and Durand's superimposition of this recording with violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker's performance of Éliane Radigue's Occam River II. Inspired by the beauty of this chance encounter (and other experiments with non-synchronous collaboration during the pandemic years), Tarozzi and Walker recorded independently, without hearing Cuni's voice but "having her present in memory." Tarozzi and Walker's bowed strings places Cuni's magisterial performance in a new context, emphasizing, as Radigue commented upon hearing the initial layering of her piece with Cuni's voice, a shared "searching toward the partials, overtones, these natural constituents of acoustical sounds in their richness." Primarily focusing on her lower register, Cuni's performance demonstrates her mastery of microtonal pitch subtleties, elegant sweeping glissandi and meditatively unhurried pacing. The continuation of the same recording by Cuni forms the foundation of "Bhoop-Murchana," with Anthea Caddy on cello and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone. In contrast to the randomized layering of the first piece, here Durand and Caddy have carefully selected pitches based on the raag Cuni sings, using the "Murchana" form, which uses the constituent notes of the raag as tonics of new raags, retaining the same interval structure. Both players who have developed tones of striking depth and harmonic purity on their instruments, Caddy and Durand's patient long tones are simultaneously rigorously grounded in the physical properties of sound and possessed of an immaterial, floating quality. Combined with Cuni's voice and, near the piece's end, her contributions on hammered and plucked tanpura, the effect borders on miraculous. Accompanied by liner notes from Durand, Tarozzi and Walker, Melopea is both a moving tribute to the profound art of Amelia Cuni and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to it. Show more