May 8, 2016

Sundaze 1619

Hello, between the usual noise of the day was a blip about a Sufi master being slashed to death in Bangladeshi mango groove, the fundamentalist daesh related muslims have killed bloggers for their worldly ideas and the peaceful resistance of them by the Sufis has clearly triggered this sectarian murder. Obviously and sadly they failed to grasp the Divine Love Songs Of The Persian Sufi Masters



Today's artist is one of Iran's most potent voices in exile for the simple reason that she possesses a marvelously potent voice. She wails and coos and ululates, the sound of the soul in translation. When she sings low and gravelly, she transforms herself into an earthy, erotic chanteuse. When high, she flies free with the birds. .. ........N'Joy

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Sussan Deyhim is an Iranian composer, vocalist, performance artist and activist. She is internationally known for creating a unique sonic and vocal language imbued with a sense of ritual and the unknown. She was part of the national ballet company in Iran from the age of thirteen and she traveled all across Iran studying with master folk musicians and dancers. In 1976, she joined The Bejart Ballet in Europe after receiving a scholarship to attend Bejart's performance art school Mudra where she was trained in many of the great world, dance, music and theater traditions as well as in classical ballet. Her music remains true to the spirit of her ancient heritage while pointing to the future with a very personal and poetic dramatic sensibility. In 1980, she moved to New York, embarking on a multifaceted career encompassing music, theatre, dance, media and film. She created/starred in ground breakin gmedia operas at La Mama in the 1980s including Azax/ Attra and The Ghost of Ibn Sabah.

Deyhim's wide-ranging collaborations with leading artists from across the spectrum of contemporary art have
included Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Peter Gabriel, Bill Laswell, Richard Horowitz, Rufus Wainwright, Marius De Vries, Hal Winer, Mickey Hart, Branford Marsalis, Jerry Garcia, Will Calhoun, Karsh Kale, Doug Wimbish, Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald, Jah Wobble, Talvin Singh, Adrian Sherwood and The Blue Man Group and with prominent female visual artists Shirin Neshat, Sophie Calle and Lita Albuquerque.

Her composition "Windfall/Beshno Az Ney" was recently used by U2 throughout the US and Europe in U2's 360 tour in one of the largest scale tock tours to this day. "Beshno Az Ney" is an intro to U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" a moving number in solidarity with Iran's Green movement. Deyhim has performed with international orchestras such as the Polish Radio Orchestra and the Kraków Philharmonic and has received commissions as a composer from international ensembles such as Bang On A Can. She has performed her music at Lincoln Center Summer Festival, Carnegie Recital Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, The Old Vic, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Royce Hall and many other major venues.

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This superbly produced collection in the Made to Measure series documents various recording activities by the team of Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz during the '80s. They turned out some fantastic stuff during this period, recording in both Brussels and New York. The album will make listeners want to go out and find whatever else they can by these artists, confident in the expectation that nobody worked quite like them or, subsequently, pulled ore of equal value out of the mine they excavated. Considering the influence of world music, in this case Persian classical music, as well as the explosion in electronic musical activity in the '80s, the comparison with mining can be fleshed out into an event sort of like the original Gold Rush. The flesh in question would belong to all the performers in potential discussion who crossbred snippets of ethnic music with dance beats and/or electronic gurgling. The outside of any large mine would, of course, include a discarded slag heap, which is where most of this kind of musical fusion winds up. The work of Deyhim and Horowitz is something special, however. The mixes of tracks such as the opening "Ishtar" have a thickness that rests on the face like a hot cloth. There seems a slight danger of suffocation, the collective sound crying out for openings that mixers such as Uri Barak must not have agreed were necessary. The unending flow of provocative ideas quickly eliminates any discomfort from a typical example of audio mixes being governed by trends of the day, which in this case was overload. (Some of the studios used, such as Noise New York, had notoriously leaky boards, too.) Deyhim's vocals are incredibly absorbing on many of these tracks, the richness of her vision deepening over the passing of time, although this is hardly the sort of collection where the earlier material has a threadbare quality. The sounds escaping her lips are just the beginning of what happens, however. Horowitz's processing and synthesizer creations both reaffirm and deconstruct the pair's delight in shocking noise a true credit to their natures as humans.



Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz - Desert Equations  (flac  358mb)

01 Ishtar 4:05
02 Got Away 4:38
03 I'm A Man 5:29
04 Tear 2:52
05 Azax Attra 7:26
06 Jum Jum 4:56
07 Armour4:57
08 Desert Equations (For Brion Gysin) 6:54

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Majoun is a collaboration of composer, performer, producer, American Richard Horowitz and Tehrani Sussan Deyhim. Majoun means potion in Persian and Arabic—it is also a Moroccan psychedelic delicacy made with 56 spices and pure paste of hashish. The fluidity of intertwining sounds of East and West summoned by Deyhim’s voice and Horowitz’s rhythms and orchestrations are as intoxicating as the ingredients of this elixir.

The listener is transmuted in both geography and dimension. The vastness of space created by the special layering of instruments and voice is contrasted by the intimacy of their sound. Deyhim’s voice, a finely trained gymnast deftly gathering momentum and speed as it launches, spins and twists over the listener’s head, and then lands elegantly. The interspersing vocal textures that resonate like gigantic springs are juxtaposed against a very personal harmonic sensitivity derived from her ancient melodic heritage.

Horowitz seamlessly unites human orchestrations and vocals with digitally enhanced instrumentation, blurring the listener’s ability to trace whether orchestration tracks vocals or vice versa and proving yet again that he is the consummate sorcerer of this form—the demons of Morocco pumping through his veins and music. (In 1992 in Seville he directed, composed, and performed a piece with 200 musicians from ten tribes and ten western musicians.) The pacing of composition has an exacting control over mood ranging from frenzied ecstasy to the emotionally languorous. As the sonic landscape becomes more minimal, spotlighting a particular instrument or vocal passage, the emotional intensity is at its most audible. Although the sound processing is important, the album features many live musicians, including world music expert Jaron Lanier and members of the Moroccan National Radio and Television Orchestra. Majoun offers layers upon veils of mysteries and never stoops to trite Middle Eastern musical clichés..



Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz - Majoun  (flac  329mb)

01 Majoun 5:52
02 Kye Kye (Who Is Who Is) 8:36
03 Agonethi (Shadow Maps) 7:20
04 Whorl On The Mount Of Moon 10:32
05 Coldest Day 5:04
06 Ipissima Verba 7:24
07 Murmur Mutanta 7:52
08 Botachine (Infinitely Curved) 9:32

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The Sufi are a minority sect in the Muslim world, their belief in music and poetry as means of spiritual enlightenment running particularly contrary to the prevailing (and misguided) image of Islam as a religion that seeks to suppress such forms of artistic expression. It’s Sufism that fuels such musical styles as qawwali and Gnawa trance, and it’s what inspired influential poets like Rumi. The words of those 11th to 19th century mystic poets and the classical Persian melodies that turned them into songs. Remarkably for a singer of such high reputation, who has been active as a recording artist since the mid-1980s, this is Sussan Deyhim's first solo recording. Previous outings included albums created in tandem with Richard Horowitz, the magnificent Majoun among them, and innumerable guest appearances on CDs by the likes of Bill Laswell, Jah Wobble, Russell Mills, and Brian Eno. On Madman of God Deyhim returns to the roots of her own musical tradition: a millennium's worth of Sufi love poetry. Familiar folk music to generations of Iranians, Deyhim transcends the merely archival in her interpretations of these classic melodies with her rich, musty vocals and eclectic arrangements. More than ably assisting her are a cross-genre collection of musicians, including Raz Mesinai (aka Badawi), Reggie Workman, Karsh Kale, Horowitz, cellist Dawn Bukholtz Andrews, and Reza Derakhshani on a variety of stringed traditional instruments. Deyhim certainly exercises her gift with flourish; the largely wordless vocal of "Daylaman (Inextricable)" or her show-stopping imitation of tablas on "Negara (Mesmerized Mirror)" are but two striking examples. Together with performances like the elegiac "Hamcho Farhad (Our Tears, Our Wine, Our Sight)" and "Navai (Savage Bird)," with its distinctly Celtic undertones, this album is actually more accessible than her more avant-garde (though equally entrancing) efforts with Horowitz.



Sussan Deyhim - Madman Of God (Divine Love Songs Of The Persian Sufi Masters)  (flac 476mb)

01 Gereyley (Nocturnal Dialogue) 5:56
02 The Candle & The Moth 5:10
03 Daylaman (Inextricable) 6:20
04 Meykhaneh (Wine Cave) 5:39
05 Bade Saba (The Wind Of Saba) 6:23
06 Negara (Mesmerized Mirror) 5:22
08 Navai (Savage Bird) 6:24

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Shy Angels is Bill Laswell's reinterpretation of the entire Madman Of God album, in which Sussan Deyhim presents her uniquely personal reading of divine love poems by Rumi, Saadi and other Persian Sufi masters.
This album is all Laswell, it's a verry eastern album with fusion dub elementz.. West meets middle east, drum & bass mixes with mesmerising voice, fusion of contemporary sensitivity with spiritual inspiration. In this work Laswell's low key production elevates the ethereal voice of Sussan Deyhim and provides a contemporary springboard for her angelical convolutions. Some usual collaborators - Zakir Hussain, Aiyb Dieng - contribute to the landscape to keep the voice centre-stage. In the vast production by Laswell this work occupies the more mystical area and I really enjoy how the voice is treated and merged with the sound produced by Laswell . The only thing missing for me is a traslation of the lyrics to let the listener fully understand the powerful significance of the words.



Sussan Deyhim and Bill Laswell - Shy Angels (flac 261mb)

01 The Candle And The Moth 5:42
02 Bade Saba (The Wind Of Saba) 11:32
03 Daylaman (Inextricable) 4:12
04 Meykhaneh (Wine Cave) 5:24
05 Navai (Savage Bird) 5:18
06 Negara (Mesmerized Mirror) 4:18
07 Gereyley (Nocturnal Dialogue) 6:46
08 Hamcho Farhad (Our Tears, Our Wine, Our Sight) 2:14

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7 comments:

bobbysu said...

thank you so much

Anonymous said...

fantastic!

Ed

Matt said...

Cool stuff. The Majoun link doesn't work though, it's asking for a user login at the host site.

Nubban Lama Mipham Chögyal said...

Hello Rho,

I've never heard of Sussan Deyhim. Looks v interesting. Please re-up if able. Best regards.

docart420 said...

The re up link for Desert Equations does not work for any of the four sites it is hosted at. Thanx

Anonymous said...

Hi Rho, I concur with docart, Desert Equations would be splendid. Thanks :)

Rho said...

Ah Yes the new link hadn't been entered, lot's of multitasking going on when i'm re upping so 1 in 50 going wrong is acceptable to me, as it happens i'd noticed when it didn't get any takers that i hadn't put in the new link..it's there now N-Joy