Giacinto Scelsi – Incantations (2005)

The songs for solo voice (with and without tape) on this disc are aptly called “incantations”, for that’s exactly how they should be defined. They have this intense and slightly uncomfortable feel of ancient rituals to them; calling them melodies, then, would be a gross misnomer.
Wicked Scelsi! The sounds do not make it clear whether these wailings were meant to ward off evil or to invoke it…but I do have a fantasy of the little recluse composing these songs somewhere in the recesses of his mansion, eyes glittering with a feverish lust for world domination: seeking to enslave those in power by means of secret charms carved onto a stone in cuneiform or sanskrit script. That stone had waited thousands of years for our monomaniacal count to find it, and only he could decipher its message. There we are: Scelsi, the last Highpriest of a long lost civilisation.
Alright, allow me this little indulgement in fiction. But yes, that’s how it sounds. Archaic charms, ancient demons, madness, obsession. Marianne Schuppe seems to have the perfect voice for it. It works. That is to say, I suggested elsewhere I’m still hoping for Diamanda Galas to do an interpretation of Scelsi songs using her spinto sopranic voice, that might work even better; but I suppose that’s not going to happen.

I saw this album in the digital catalogue of my library. To my surprise, my own rather confusing Scelsi catalogue didn’t mention the incantations anywhere. So, I studied the contents of my Scelsi discs minutely, wanting to bring back some order in the chaos; but titles like Sauh, Taigaru and Ho didn’t show up. Nor could I find them on any of the web’s big music sites, including avax.
Good! That meant it was new to me, and I ordered for it. A sad note here: the booklet lacked a couple of pages. You know how it is, people borrow cds and next they tear up booklets for fun, damn them. Fortunately, the review of the album on New Albion’s site IS the booklet, so I copied that to a Word document and included it in the archives. Perhaps not so nice as a scanned jpg, but well, the necessary information is there.

Tracks:

01. Sauh I - IV (1973) Liturgy for voice with magnetic tape [0:06:40.46]
02. Sauh II [0:06:17.11]
03. Sauh III [0:06:49.38]
04. Sauh IV [0:07:00.05]
05. Taiagaru (1962) 5 invocations for female voice [0:02:55.29]
06. Taiagaru II [0:02:16.60]
07. Taiagaru III [0:03:00.02]
08. Taiagaru IV [0:01:55.50]
09. Taiagaru V [0:03:06.58]
10. Ho (1960) 4 melodies for female voice [0:01:54.30]
11. Ho II [0:02:44.15]
12. Ho III [0:03:28.40]
13. Ho IV [0:02:43.17]

Performer:

Marianne Schuppe