SoCorpo: Inelement

Let’s first see what the CD is all about. It’s essentially vocal music: two interwoven voices making sounds and tonal colors. The use of the voices mimics singing but not singing melodies that would follow a certain tonality. No words, just vocal improvisations and experimentations helped by unusual instruments such as bowed psaltery and electro-acoustic Array Mbira (a modified and electronically enhanced contemporary version of the West African thumb piano) as well as electronic or in-studio effects and processing.

All elements … “come together to create a texture that is at once intriguing and relaxing, but with just enough of an edge to keep things interesting.” The citation is from the publicist Ron Kadish, and it pretty well describes what’s going on in the album. The subordinate clause is interesting because the music can start to feel kind of monotonous unless listened carefully, and once it’s under closer investigation there are elements that aren’t that easy to swallow. There’s something “disturbing” in the music making it harder to conceive as ambient or atmospheric music. The presence of such a disturbing factor is always a positive sign.

It might help if the listener knows how to enter into the spirit of the musical intentions of the musicians, the duo SoCorpo, comprising of two etno-musicians Sabrina Lastman and Sasha Boganowitsch whose latest disc this is. I stress “musical intentions”, as there’s a “metaphysical” story behind the tracks too: earth, water, fire, air … the elements, you know. But I don’t think knowing the literary or conceptual background is at all a necessary condition for making sense of the duo’s music. After all, from the very first second it’s evident that the disc is not about current Western pop music, and, more interestingly, it is equally obvious that it owes to “ethnographic” music – at least to a person like me who gets exposed, not often but still sufficiently, to music by Lapplanders (saame) and musicians from the North of Norway. The formal similarity is obvious, and in that sense the music lacked the “surprise factor” that it can have for other people.