Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang - Azure (LP)

Ideologic Organ Music is pleased to have the opportunity to work again with a third beautiful album by the duo of Jessika Kenney — a vocalist and composer at a unique intersection haptic and aural sensibilities, and Eyvind Kang — composer and violist here exploring tonality on an expanded definition of string harmonics via viola d'amore, as a result of a deep period of renewed studies with Dr. N. Rajam. The duo take an extended return to their hypnotic unison music in their most pared-down recording since their 2011 LP "The face of the earth". Compositions on this album belie a sensation of minimalism, in fact being a design of temporality and drift, like a haze of light across the sky. The morning followed after watching the moon, then the sea. They matched and observed in exact traces of feeling, timbre and sensibility—profound calmness in arcs of tonal colour."The title "Azure" is a pun on the Persian "az u" or "from them", which is the final two words of each couplet of a Hafez ghazal whose first line is :"Khatt-e ozar-e yar ke begereft mah az u (moon by them)Khosh halghe ist lik dar nist rah az u" (way out from them)"The mark on the face of the beloved that eclipses the moon (by them)Makes a beautiful ring, but there is no way out (from them)"—JK, July 2022If Creation is a sort of transformation by a being between one world and another, how many worlds of knowledge can we listen toward when two beings ask us to listen? Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang are two sounding bodies moving knowledge from one world to our own. Listening to Azure, Kenney and Kang ask our ears to hold/stop/wait/listen closely to the edges of knowability, while the world continues around our sounding bodies. Kenney and Kang draw our ears so closely that if we are not careful, the listener's breathing could interfere, our blinking could interface with each tone, and we would blindly intercede into what is a landscape being formed before our ears. Simultaneously, Azure pushes us to find a deeper rhythm, to move, to grow, to form our listening bodies towards each composition.Sound waves move like corkscrewed planetary pathways, hurtling through space time. Azure's bowhaired/breathwork at times recedes from the ears, sometimes allowing each tone to empty space around it, clearing out channels for listening beyond.–Suzanne Kite