CARLA BOZULICH - evangelista

(CD, constellation)

I like movies that feature christian theology, demons, the resurrection of christ and bloodlines and angels and all the fights and horrors and stories the christian mythology offers to openminded readers. Nevertheless, I have shunned Dan Brown’s work in all its forms up to now and I intend to do so for some time to come, if I can manage (my beloved one has a tendency to fall for trends if they get hammered down our door long and loudly enough, so the free-tv-premiere of “sacrilege” will be the ending point of my non-Dan-Brown diet). From “dogma” to “Stigma”, from “God’s Army” to the “exorcist”, I like the idea of how far fetched and wide reaching the Christian mythology is. The new testament, albeit written 100 to 200 years after the death of Jesus Christ, is a wild read. If it wasn’t constantly regarded as “truth” or used to apologize for cruelties, wars and other aberrations, that is. What I like best about all these things is the stories and resolutions, the connotations and associations that come within that constructed frame work of meanings, rules and dogmas. A massive and intricate puzzle or painting with meanings layed over each other, reaching through centuries and working into our every day lives or being completely shut off from it. It is something similar that draws me to the new album by Carla Bozulich time and time again.

Of course, it was the movie-soundtrack like beginning of the album with the bell-sounds and the energetic, thick layers of strings in connection with the title of the album that brought me to the connotation with Christian mythology, but that is in itself a part of the fascination of working up or diving into a complex network of meanings and hints. Sometimes the network is almost completely made up by the listener. Not in this case. Bozulich spins a deep and mystifying network of sounds, harmonies, words and content on “evangelista”. As an explainer of the world or someone re-telling the story of the saviour, or however you want to translate the word evangelist nowadays, Bozulich is more settled with the mystics and visionary seers of old centuries, though only a few of them, like Hildegard von Bingen, set their godly inspirations into sounds or songs. She doesn’t keep anything back as well. Some of the tracks on here, like “How to survive getting hit by lightning”, are bared to the bone and almost painful in their openness and directness. A raw version of songs if there ever was one, where a track like “pissing”, with recognizeable chord changes and vocal harmonies come as a relief (and that one is a cover version - originally by Low). Even if it builds up and breaks down over you like a slow moving Tsunami. No wonder her favourite animals are cats.

Mostly only supported by a score of sounds, noises or layers of sounds and noises, Bozulich uses nothing but her remarkable voice to get down into the deepest waters of her own fate. This ranges from a stripped down, creaking solo piano tingling in the back to a dense wall of sounds of various sources. It also ranges from the lonely, tiny childhood nightmare so forgotten and small that all it ever worked out was a tiny little tear soon dried out to the evocation of armies of demons and angels burning and flaming with endless anger and apocalyptic fire. And all the while it is back and back again to the honest and true emotions that Bozulich infuses her vocals with. In experimental music as in more straight forward genres, after all is said and done it is the attitude that either makes or breaks the music. Bozulich stands up tall and walks straight, even if there is a fire raging inside her.