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Danse Macabre Andrew Katzenstein Lament from Epirus: original 78s, including works of Delta passionate; the instruments keen like melody while the rest remain on fixed An Odyssey into Europe’s blues, Cajun, gospel, and Sacred Harp wolves or flutter and swoop like hum- tones. Iso- polyphony has a hypnotic ef- Oldest Surviving Folk Music music. His unorthodox methods for mingbirds. The insistent strumming fect: the moving parts play off against by Christopher C. King. capturing sound from these old records and drumming, the pedal notes, the the static ones, which gives the music Norton, 304 pp., $29.95 yield brilliant results. The music critic droning of strings and accompanying a tension that always tends toward the Amanda Petrusich observed that in voices churn with a primeval energy. keynote but only rarely resolves. Sing- Kitsos Harisiadis: King’s home studio, Aspects of the music suggest bluegrass, ers in iso- polyphony use no vibrato Lament in a Deep Style, 1929–1931 or free jazz, or the Velvet Underground, and channel sound through their nasal an album produced the turntable . .was littered with or the Carnatic music of southern India. passages, creating a buzziness when by Christopher King oddly sized bits—matchsticks, But something sounds a bit off: the in- harmonies are close and a powerful, with Vassilis Georganos. tongue depressors, little plastic struments aren’t quite in tune and aren’t limpid tone when the voices collapse Third Man Records, $15.00 ice- cream spoons—that he used to playing quite the same melody, or the into unison. weigh down the tone arm based on meter in a song intended for dancing is King emphasizes two types of While You Live, Shine assumptions he’d made or things a fast 7/8 or 9/8 that no one, it seems, Epirotic songs: the skaros and the mi- a documentary film he’d learned regarding certain could possibly keep up with. rologi. Both are played in free rhythm directed by Paul Duane studios or recording sessions. He After this initial impression, though, and feature improvised solos from accommodated for factors like am- aspects of the music become clear. klarino and violin. The skaros takes In 2009, the American re- its name from a word refer- cord collector and audio ring to the practice of graz- engineer Christopher King ing sheep at night, when they bought a stack of 78 rpm are thought to have better discs while on vacation in appetites. It is believed that Istanbul. A self- described the skaros, variants of which obsessive for whom “the exist throughout the Bal- rare musk of shellac” is “the kans, began as tunes played second most arousing smell by shepherds on the flute to in the world,” he waited convey specific instructions impatiently to play his pur- to their flocks, and some still chases. Their contents were use music to communicate mysterious: the labels were with them. Listeners “who Nikos Economopoulos/Magnum Photos Nikos written in Greek, and King are attentive to the skaros are knew enough of the lan- drawn into a calm, trance- guage to realize that they like state,” King writes. “made no linguistic sense.” The word mirologi typi- He returned home ten days cally refers to vocal laments; later. “Decades of listen- there are versions of them ing to unvarnished prewar in Homer and on ancient music—Delta blues by Char- epitaphs. In some parts of lie Patton and fiddle records rural Greece, women sing by the Carter Brothers and mirologia beside the graves Son,” he writes in Lament of family members every day from Epirus, had not pre- for years, until the bones of pared him for what he heard the deceased are exhumed when he dropped the needle: and put in the village os- suary. Epirus is the only Insistent droning voices Musicians and dancers at a festival in Ganadio, a village in the region of Epirus in northwestern Greece, 2000 place where mirologia are and instruments merged, performed instrumentally, clashing against each other. One bient humidity, or a tilt in the floor- Many Epirotic dance songs have simple and musicians preserve the lugubrious vocal threaded its way between boards, or a distraction on the part melodies, which allow for embellish- mood of the sung versions found else- instruments while another voice of the original engineer.1 ment and improvisation. Lead parts where in Greece: mirrored the lead singer an octave are typically played by violin and kla- below. The music reached a cre- Over the past seven years, King rino (a type of clarinet), accompanied For the world is a tree, and we are scendo, crashed, and repeated . it has released six albums—nearly ten by laouto (a stringed instrument simi- its fruit, sounded like a massive coffee can hours—of songs from his collection lar to the oud) and defi (frame drum). And [Charon], who is the of angry bees had been shaken and of rural Greek and southern Albanian Klarino and violin players in particu- vintager, gathers its fruit. released in front of me. 78s. In Lament from Epirus, he re- lar display virtuosity with quick runs counts his odyssey, as he calls it, into of scales, trills, and large intervallic The music deeply affected King. He the region’s music, its history, and the jumps, especially of the minor sevenths The second- most- mountainous region felt as if he “had been taken apart and secrets he thinks it contains. King be- that give the style one of its most dis- in Europe, Epirus has harsh weather rearranged,” but the sensation was lieves that he has found in Epirotic tinctive characteristics. Even when and little arable land. As one Epirote “pleasurable—a necessary catharsis.” music the oldest folk tradition in Eu- doubling a melody with the violin, the told King, “Life has always been hard It was love at first listen. rope, one that began in pre-Homeric klarino lithely adds flourishes and fili- in the mountains, everything has always King learned that the records were cultures, hasn’t changed significantly grees around its partner. been uncertain.” Ancient Greeks be- made in the 1920s and 1930s by musi- in hundreds of years, and reveals the King writes that the vocabulary lieved the entrance to Hades was here: cians from Epirus, an area straddling origins and ultimate meaning of hu- and timbre of the music mimic the re- the Acheron River that Odysseus— northwestern Greece and southern manly organized sound. This engaging, gion’s cragged landscape and its fauna: and later Dante—crossed to reach the Albania. Eager for more, he contacted well- researched, and peculiar book is “Phrases imitate sounds found in na- underworld flows, in reality, west from Elias and Vasilis Barounis, Athe- not only a work of music criticism or a ture: the singing of a nightingale, the Epirus’s mountains toward the Ionian nian brothers who owned an impres- philosophical rumination on the mean- babbling of a brook, the baying and Sea. Pilgrims hoping to summon the sive collection of Greek folk 78s and ing of music—it’s also a travelogue in barking of animals, and the surge of a ghosts of departed loved ones visited sparingly sold some to him for a few which the writer goes native. storm.” To achieve this mimetic effect, the Nekromanteion, a temple located hundred dollars apiece. After Vasilis violin and klarino players use scoops in a cave near the Acheron. For days, died in 2011, Elias sold their entire ar- and bends that elide distinctions be- and for a considerable fee, they un- chive of Epirotic recordings to King— The first thing one notices about tween pitches, almost imperceptible derwent purificatory rituals, including “something unprecedented among Epirotic music from the 1920s and grace notes in the upper registers, and the consumption of pork, oysters, and record collectors”—giving him the 1930s is that it’s raw. This isn’t just a re- heavy vibrato. a type of bean that induced hallucina- “staggering responsibility as a care- sult of the grainy quality of the record- In songs that include one or two tions. When the supplicant was ready, taker of this region’s ancient musical ing. The singing is full- throated and singers, klarino and violin offer coun- he slaughtered a sheep and was led to legacy on the 78 rpm disc.” termelodies behind the vocalists, and a central chamber, which spirits could Elias couldn’t have chosen a more instrumental improvisations alternate enter from the beyond. Priests hidden loving or passionate custodian. Born 1Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, with sung verses. Songs with more in a second chamber impersonated the and raised in Virginia, King has remas- Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest than two singers use iso- polyphony, in deceased, barked to suggest the pres- tered thousands of songs from their 78rpm Records (Scribner, 2014), p. 39. which some voices state or respond to a ence of Cerberus, and manipulated June 28, 2018 41 Katzenstein_41_43.indd 41 5/29/18 5:11 PM pulleys that sent up objects to dazzle taker—a job well suited to his morbid Lament in a Deep Style. Harisiadis’s state of having the blues with which the impressionable pilgrim. disposition—and until his vacation to tone is sweeter than many other klar- I had no prior experience.2 The difficulty of life in Epirus has Istanbul he had spent only a few weeks inists’, but most striking is his fleet, ef- been compounded by military failures outside Virginia, including a three- day fortless virtuosity. Although music in and foreign invasions. Romans, Byz- stint in a philosophy Ph.D.