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face to face with the goat god
I posted an MP3 last Friday, and I'll post one today-- maybe we can make this a weekly thing.
Today: the Master Musicians of Jajouka.
Famously described by William S. Burroughs as "a 4,000 year old rock 'n' roll band," the Master Musicians are a Moroccan ensemble located south of Tangier. It's theorized that the primary Jajoukan festival is in fact a reenactment of the Lupercalia, the Roman Rites of Pan, and much of the ecstatic Jajoukan music found on this recording (1992's Apocalypse Across the Sky) can, indeed, be described as panic-inducing: it's some of the most frightening music I've ever heard. The dominant instrument on many of these tracks is the ghaitia, a terrifyingly shrill pipe: when played in mass ensemble, these pipes are pretty ego-annihilating. (Their intricate melodic lines may also have inspired the hallucinatory calligrammatic art of cut-up pioneer Brion Gysin, who for two years ran a Tangier restaurant where the Master Musicians served as the house band.)
The particular piece I'm putting up today doesn't feature the pipes, but rather a drummer and what sounds like two musicians on stringed instruments (to deduce from the liner notes, I'd guess a gimbri and lira). What's special here is the way that even with only these minimal means, the track still has the capability to send the receptive listener directly into a potent trance state. Lights out.
Listen: "The Middle of the Night" by the Master Musicians of Jajouka Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary |
Friday, April 22, 2005
4:49 PM
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