On a hung over Sunday afternoon, after an emotional and draining week, I sat down to Stefano Battaglia and Michele Rabbia’s Pastorale album. I discovered the album to be a perfectly prescribed minimalist way to reflect and slow down - a rare luxury in our often busy, multitasking, non-stop modern lives.
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Stefano Battaglia & Michele Rabbia
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"Pastorale"
(Ecm Records)
Released March 14, 2010
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The first track, “Antifona,” meditatively repeats a four-note motif against electronic textures that blend with live percussion colors. Violin bows scraped against cymbals, solemnly ringing monk bowls and soft gamelan like bells gently sprinkled on the melody. “Tanz Theater” made me feel like losing my mind in a kind of Eternal Sunshine sort of world…exploration of textures with tracks like “Oracolo,” stuck out in its unique drops of metallic rain stick textures and gentle pots and pans types of sounds. The Middle Eastern chopped up “Sundance in Balkh,” with frame drum capturing the percussive nature of the Mediterranean modality.
The painful track “Kursk Requiem,” similar to Gyorgi Ligeti’s “Atmosphere,” sounded actually soothing to me even while it reminded me of a 90s horror film soundtrack. I showed it to a Chinese friend of mine who found the high-pitched screeching sounds soothing. It’s reminiscent of sounds used in Chinese weddings and also during ceremonies of mourning.
The track “Pastorale’s,” major pentatonic joyfulness outlined by the detuned drum textures, showed remnants of moments of pain and disorder perhaps from previous tracks. It showed something well crafted and thought out. There was a story from the first to the last track, as opposed to the 11 random tracks that sound somewhat similar.
The duo uses space as much as they use notes, creating hauntingly attractive serene landscapes. It puts you in the mood to be still, contemplative, and meditative. There’s surprisingly so much that is felt by the intense gaps of silence between notes. It’s tricky to find the right mood to be able to listen to it, and for many, it’s a genre that is an acquired taste. But once in it, it becomes a very powerful thing as it lends itself to a very different way to express common emotion… that is, if you let it.
Some tracks are a little hard to digest. For this type of music, it’s hard to find the right mood, and even in it, so much experimentation of such unknown sounds can be overwhelming. However, the album still managed to expand my horizons and give me a calm mind that I had been yearning. This album serves its purpose to those (by which I mean everyone) that need to mediate, relax, and be exposed to something new and weird once in awhile.
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