Released at September 24, 2012
(c)2012 samadhisound IIc.
Where the surface of the endless ocean is broken by reefs and atolls and the remnants of extinct volcanoes, his domain begins. It is his delight to see life breaking out from rock and volcanic ash, seeds carried by the wind, birds building their nests and turtles making their way onto the beaches. The big islands can manage on their own, the small ones need his protection. He stands in the service of creation. New islands come into being even as he thinks them out. When they are fully formed, he sees that it is good and that all things are as they should be. The plains extend to the water's edge, the grass is soft under his feet and the salt winds ruffle his white hair. He nerds the clouds and brings them home at sunset to provide the world with wetness. He whishes to share these things with us, but as we fail to answer he talks to his own echo and addresses beetles in the language of beetles. On the smallest of islands he has built a shelter of branches where he will let us stay. His own desire would be to sit through eternity watching running water and the wind in the delicate tracery of the aspen's seismographs, the marriage of time and space enacted and ever changing in aimless movement. At the hour of twilight he wanders over small grasslands with a cat who lets him hear the story of the very first creation.
Uncommon Deities poem (Punkt 2011) on music by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré.
Music by Bang, Honoré
Poem by Paal-Helge Haugen
Poems by Paal-Helge Haugen and Nils Chr. Moe-Repstad
The CD release of Uncommon Deities isn’t a document of the installation, but a reinvention: the poems and Sylvian’s readings are placed in new settings by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. The cofounders of the Punkt festival and close collaborators on the original installation, Bang and Honoré draw on new performances by the deeply sympathetic trumpeter Arve Henriksen and the startling, elemental singer Sidsel
Endresen. These improvisations join live material captured at last year’s Punkt events, in a production that’s spacious and atmospheric, somber and escapist, light-hearted and steeped in history – a recording as rich as the ancestry of the work that inspired it.
David Sylvian / voice
Erik Honoré – samples, synthesizers, synth bass
Jan Bang – samples
Christian Wallumrød – trumpet and piano samples
Arve Henriksen – trumpet and piano samples
Official microsite of Uncommon Deities
