Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ
Three Mountain Pass

Three Mountain Pass is a unique oddity, a reimagining of traditional Vietnamese music by Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, who has been working with the 16-string dàn tranh zither since the age of four. It says something when the most normal-sounding track on your album is your collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. Their “Luu Thuy Truong” seems so routinely deconstructive, all angled and pithy with its ensemble of strings, but Võ‘s own dàn b?u/dàn tranh version of Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 3” is like a theremin muttering to itself underneath a blanket. No surprise that she likes Satie, that experimental humourist. Her Vietnamese instruments are regenerated objects. “The dan Bau is traditionally a solo instrument,” she explains, so she put three of them together to see what would happen. Something like throat singers on springs is the answer. The album is not only a rethinking of established modes, it’s also a series of experiments with scale. She’s probing at the boundaires of the appropriate merger. Does a massive Japanese taiko drum belong with a little t’rung? No, so let’s do it. Her descriptions of her own motives in the booklet are so very very modest. Deanne Sole