World Music Wire

On a beach, a fisherman pours his heart into a love song for his wife, taken by the sea. A worn but beautiful woman, at first shy and retiring, sings an unexpectedly passionate welcome. A couple selling trinkets to sun-hungry tourists opens an arresting trove of traditional instruments and plays them with astounding zeal.

On the shores of great tragedy and destruction, the sounds and images of the Laya Project reveal an abundance of life-affirming music made by ordinary villagers, sounds from coastal communities affected by the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives, India, and Myanmar (Burma). Recorded on site during impromptu sessions over the course of more than two years in dozens of overlooked areas, the interwoven songs and tunes that became the Project span national, ethnic, and religious boundaries and reflect a unifying triumph of human resilience and creativity.

Envisioned as a response to the tsunami, the epic journey of the Project—envisioned from the start as both a 2-CD set and a documentary film—was initiated and entirely supported by friend and patron of music arts Sastry Karra, who along with the many dedicated members of the multi-national team behind the Laya Project, felt they needed to do something more than simply provide material relief. “While the massive aid that came in addressed the basic crisis of food, clothing, and shelter,” Project director and producer Sonya Mazumdar recalls, “there was little assistance for music or the local performing arts, which form the cultural spine of villages in rural communities of the region.”

Putting together yet another compilation of big names or international celebrities for a cause left them cold. The EarthSync crew longed to capture the depth and breadth of ordinary people, their extraordinary songs, and to pay tribute to their resilience, their celebration of life, their joy.

The team opted for one of most difficult and exhaustive approaches imaginable: to research, record, and work with material from everyday people most directly and devastatingly affected by the tsunami. This meant tackling a tangle of visas, permits, and paperwork before they even arrived on the ground. Once they landed, they travelled difficult roads to remote places. They made recordings using a car battery to power their portable studio, and faced the toll the tragedy had taken on often threatened local cultures.

What they found when they began working with people, however, was joy, strength, and a wealth of music, some of it never before documented and recorded. Guided by indefatigable Indonesian researcher Ernest Hariyanto and a plethora of knowledgeable locals and music lovers, sound designer and engineer Yotam Agam, music producer Patrick Sebag, film director Harold Monfils, and their tireless crew captured hundreds of hours of performances by people who came forward to share their music.

“Part of what became ‘A New Day’ was a song sung by a fisherman in one of the first villages we visited in Sri Lanka as part of the Project,” recounts Agam. “He was singing a love song for his wife, whom he’d lost in the tsunami. It was deeply moving.”

It wasn’t just the crew who were moved, however; the local people they encountered felt moved to come forward and bring their music. There were the Jarasathusorns, husband and wife who sold soap flowers on Phuket Island, Thailand’s tourist hot spot: “We didn’t expect to find much traditional music there,” Agam notes, “and yet here was this couple who could sing and play all sorts of Thai instruments, as you can hear on ‘Water Side Tales.’”

Then there was Shaheema, the Maldives woman whose experienced and striking face graces the Project’s cover. “While recording a group of male percussionists on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, a woman approached us from the bush and requested to sing us a welcome song. This was surprising because the women had been in the background most of the time,” Agam remembers. “Once she started singing, though, the song she sang was so pure and beautiful.” That rare moment became “Farihi.”

The team had an embarrassment of riches garnered from such moments, and Agam and Sebag, returning from the field faced the formidable task of transforming gorgeous music recorded in less than ideal settings into a whole. They judiciously mixed, remixed, and added gentle infusions of keyboards and other instruments to gems from various sessions and locations, making sure to honor the spirit of the people and places involved.

In their careful work, Agam and Sebag strove to create a framework and a context for listeners outside of the communities where the music originates, in hopes of creating a link across cultures. “We really wanted to spark the emotional reaction appropriate to music,” Mazumdar explains. “That meant adding some production, to help people connect.”

Fusing beautiful yet disparate moments lies at the heart of the Project’s motive and mission. “‘Laya’ is a really resonant and rich Sanskrit word with many contextual meanings,” Mazumdar muses. “It can mean fusion; the union of song, dance and instrumental music; time or a pause in music; rest; embrace; the supreme being; destruction; to set in motion, among other things. It’s a word that best encapsulates the essence of the project.”

What started as an epic journey has taken on a life of its own, and the Laya Project has unfolded in several other media, in an effort to continue the efforts to provide sustainable exposure and outlets for local creativity.

The award-winning film, directed by Monfils and available on DVD, reveals the lush visual side of the sounds uncovered during the crew’s many travels, with post production by Arturo Calvete, Henrik Silkstrom and Jose Garrido. Artists Agam and Sebag first met in the middle of nowhere have become new and important collaborators. And a live show featuring Laya artists has begun to tour internationally, spreading the vibrant music of the South Asian coasts from India to Israel.

“The tsunami did not differentiate between cultures, races, religion, or economic backgrounds,” reflects Mazumdar. “Neither does music, except that one destroyed and the other heals.”

World Music Wire:

Writhing sea monsters and demon divorces. Magical amulets and secret sexual desires. Black metal and Blind Willie Johnson. The Bowls Project evokes the cosmopolitanism of ancient Babylon with an eerily contemporary weave of war, sex, and supernatural wonder.

This embrace of sophisticated ideas and visceral sounds comes naturally to Jewlia Eisenberg, composer, vocalist and mistress-mind behind the wryly subversive, musically mischievous group Charming Hostess. Their latest endeavor takes inscriptions from earthenware “demon bowls” once buried beneath Babylonian houses, and transforms them into songs that draw on everything from Iraqi pop to American roots music.

As Eisenberg noticed from the first moment she idly opened a seemingly fusty dissertation filled with translations of these Aramaic texts from the time and place of he Talmud, these bowls speak—and loudly. They tell of demons, angels, and gods from a half dozen ancient cultures, all entwined with the secret passions and household heartbreaks of women living 1,500 years ago.

“I was instantly mesmerized by the voices in these bowls. In the entire Talmud, you never hear women talk about themselves in the “we” form; in demon bowls you hear it all the time. I chose to set Jewish bowls, but the form is cosmopolitan and deeply porous—a Jewish bowl might define the Divine as a Bird of Rivers, call out to Dlibat, the Babylonian goddess of love, or cast a spell from a sea monster. Demon bowls contain the greatest supernatural powers right next to small domestic scenes; normal household concerns interact with fiery angels and demons,” Eisenberg recounts. “If you read one bowl text, you see this dynamic; the apocalyptic intimate. You don’t have to be a scholar or read Aramaic.”

Over four years, Eisenberg began putting these texts to music, building on her fascination with the sounds of the female body—breaths, claps, sighs, stomps, and silence. With her fellow members of Charming Hostess, she incorporated elements from the drive and clamor of black metal (the martial exorcism of “Bound and Turned Aside”) to American roots music (“Hangman”) and the devotional songs embraced by Babylonian (Iraqi) Jews (“Yedidi”).

Yet the touchstone remains the bowls. They record a world full of supernatural activity, haunting even the most ho-hum daily grind. Disguised demons afflicted families, and might even trick the unwary into marriage, forcing their unwitting spouses to seek divorces. The Leviathan shakes the earth. Angels march with swords, blocking gossipy neighbors and insuring sexual arousal.

“Demons and angels may seem remote to many of us, but in the world of the bowls, they were experienced as frequent house-guests with supernatural powers. They had rights, too, as members of the community,” notes Eisenberg. “You could try to appease them, cajole them, or bully them with bowl incantations, but whatever you do, they are around, participating in everyday life. This is very clear in the bowls, and in the traditional music I chose for the album.”

The thought of spirits swarming through the home may sound frightening, but their presence can also bring protection, as Eisenberg suggests in her haunting and unexpected transformation of the American religious song “Dying Bed (Khevra Kadisha).” With a nod to both Blind Willie Johnson and the Jewish rituals of keeping watch over the dead, Eisenberg invokes the intimate connection and peace that flows from encounters with forces beyond.

The bowl texts—written down at women’s request by professional scribes—are filled with hybrid deities and syncretic spells, spiraled incantations for health, fidelity, protection, and love.

Christians and Zoroastrians, Animists and Jews all shared gods, demons, and images as they recorded the secrets of their households—and then hid them, silently, in the earth, to protect their homes.

These women’s voices were forgotten as other texts and teachings from the time moved from the margins to the center. “The great canon of Jewish law, the Babylonian Talmud, is from the same era as these demon bowls,” Eisenberg comments, “The Talmud became the shape of post-exilic Judaism. But at the time of its compilation in 200-600 CE, the bowls were the mainstream and the rabbis were at the fringe!”

This absorption of female power into male authority is stated explicitly in some of the texts themselves. “’Smamit’”, Eisenberg explains, “tells how three angels became empowered to protect babies in crib and women in labor. The story unfolds on the body of a woman with her own supernatural powers, which she loses along with her children, but these angels get the power. You rarely get to see the move away from female magic explored so deeply.”

Eisenberg began to break the silence, as war raged in Iraq and a new crop of these artifacts turned up on the world market, due to looting, shelling, and theft. The bowls provided an unexpected entry, a chance for connection not only to women living millennia ago, but also to contemporary Iraqis and the ordinary lives of people often lost behind the civilizational myth of Sumer or the tortures of Falujah.

Eisenberg’s arrangements honor the often broken and fragmented nature of the bowls and their voices. Many of the bowls were found in pieces. And to confuse demons, the incantations would often include unpronounceable names or repeated letters. Eisenberg felt the unpronounceability had to stay: “Some of the text will just have a letter over and over again, a kind of a hissing sound to block a demon. Or it will have the letter ‘H’, a name for the Divine. I wanted to take the text and play with the parts that can’t be pronounced and the fragments,” as she does in “Malakha.”

The heart of the Bowls Project is connection, with a past, with people distant and different, and with a deep aspect of our shared experience. “These bowls are so personal that you can’t not relate to them,” Eisenberg muses. “They are similar to our own experience even though they are phrased in their own apocalyptic intimate way. And if you can relate to woman living 1,500 years ago in what’s today Iraq, you can relate to someone living there now. That’s really central.”

The Bowls Project CD release party will be held July 18 at Yerba Buena Cultural Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as part of programming for The Bowls Project: Secrets of the Apocalyptic Intimate, July 6-August 22.

This interactive sound sculpture/immersive performance installation is an international collaboration created by Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess with celebrated architect Michael Ramage and videographer Shezad Dawood. Performances will take place within a stunning masterwork of ancient-meets-modern design: a soaring double vaulted dome. The dome is a place to share a secret and listen to the anonymous secrets of others, listen to live music on Thursdays, participate in rituals on Fridays, encounter embodied text on Sundays, and dig on the apocalyptic intimate whenever YBCA is open.

Video on YouTube