House of the Deafman

House of the Deafman is a musical-dramatic dance-ritual about the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. The action takes place in a magical, endless night during which Goya gets drunk and contemplates suicide. His nightmarish Black Paintings come to life in the play in the form of OmniCircus robots and virpets (virtual digital puppets), and the painter is visited by the ghost of his great love, the Duchess of Alba. Review by James A. Gardner, All-Music Guide What is the sound of a mind disintegrating? If you could wire yourself somehow to record the sounds of your brain, badly impaired by alcohol and depression, it might sound like House of the Deafman. Especially if you were a brilliantly gifted artist who was being visited by the dark visions he has committed to canvas ... and the ghost of his lost love. There are whispers, chants, echoes, voices that seem to materialize out of the shadows and dissipate into the mist. Disturbed and disturbing. Chilling. Rich in aural imagery. Place yourself in a dimly candle-lit room, drink enough to cross over from euphoria to despair, and listen to this dark, haunting sonic journey through an anguished mind. And when it's over, House of the Deafman lingers like the nightmare that wakes you in the dim pre-dawn hours. When the music ends, put the CD in a Quicktime-enabled computer (and I recommend watching the multimedia presentation last, so as not to color your experience of the music). The sinister robotic puppet show of the OmniCircus is as unsettling as the Lady in the Radiator from David Lynch's Eraserhead. And I mean that as both an endorsement and a caution. It is evocative and memorable. Garvey's CD is a remarkable realization both of his troubling artistic vision and of the capabilities of audio-visual media. This is deeply creepy, and highly recommended. Review by François Couture, All Music Guide Subtitled 'A Robotic Scabaret,' House of the Deafman is a very strange multi-media, pluri-stylistic work. The story line is based on elements of painter Francisco Goya's life and works: in an endless night, Goya gets drunk and contemplates suicide. Some of his most nightmarish paintings come to life and he is visited by the ghost of the Duchess of Alba, his love. The stage production of this work by Frank Garvey called for various robots and real-time virtual puppets, along with musical performances by singer Diana Timble and DeusMachina, the resident ensemble at the composer's OmniCircus performance space. The crossover instrumentation of DeusMachina is what makes this CD such a mesmerizing experience: it includes keyboards, sampling, and other forms of atmospheric sound design, but also guitar, tabla, kora, and the voices of Riffat Salamat Ali Khan and Shafqat Ali Khan. Traditional Pakistani singing ('Deafman 1' and 'Deafman 2'), avant-gardist post-industrial soundscapes (the very creepy 'Tweedledee-dee'), and pop songs ('Three Fates') come together to create a surrealistic and unclassifiable sound narrative. But most importantly: it works like a charm. House of the Deafman is the kind of record you put on when you want to enter a totally different world, regardless of your affinities with avant-garde or world music; the kind of record you cherish, simply because it can be compared to nothing else. This enhanced CD also includes a short video showing the robots in action, paintings by Garvey, and the script of the stage work. Review at sonoloco.com Light children voices in nursery-rhyme innocence immediately shift into a sticky, elastic, rubbery dream-world of demons and ghastly shapes in the corner of your eye, and you're plagued by persistent flash-backs of painful moments - and suddenly you're in a percussive organ-ic stereo play that promises - and is - relief! This is an hour of ever-changing soundscapes, sonic environments, geographical hints, emotional inklings, cultural diversity and stylistic havoc in a rarely experienced richness of invention! An African kora, treated like an acoustic guitar, blends in with a desert feel, dunes and all, in a Westerner's corrupt notion, watered down to fathomable dimensions by big city streets and corner laundromats of the Americas... Slight electroacoustic deployments - really slight, fingertip sensitive, careful on the verge of elusiveness - renders the scape a dreamy, vaguely off, sub-real touch, which is very attractive to any dreamer... A flute, sounding just like a Persian nay (a wondrously simple reed flute), is in fact a keyboard, and layer upon layer of sub-reality shift like mirages across West Texas highway asphalt. An American singsong Tin Pan Alley voice secures some Western Hemisphere security in all this, in a folksy, bluesy downtown 1970s New York manner; Essra Mohawk revisited in a dream toward Battery Park, trying to catch the Staten Island ferry! Percussive prisms, pearly pantomimes of sound, again - through sly electronic shadings wringing reality out of your grasp - enter the Bardo of the hereafter, wherein the scarecrows of your mind confront you with karmic horror. Out of a sudden silence a hunky-dory story arises, in black magic Burundi whispers, which soon grow into a gloriously funny and loudmouthed Harry Partch mimicry in the courthouse park! A more dense, ominous, saliva-dripping underworld of sewer electro acoustics sweep past, pulling at your sleeve - pulling you down -, but the sad Judy Collins voice reappears out of the binaries of the crazily outwardly rotating - spiraling! - six kilometer CD track, albeit in a more medieval, Hildegard von Bingen (that's a long-shot!) guise, or perhaps in the vein of a late 1960s Joan Baez ballad... A dhrupad singer emerges out of the shadows, in a peculiar mix of North and South India traditions, in vocal expressions, which nonetheless lead on into Pakistan and strict qawwal singing in the style of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. "The Bonedance" is a Stonehenge rhythm of many summer solstices, as the rock ages and new generations pass on in procession, life after life, birth after death - and all illusory! "Nada" is nothing, but here it is something, with - of course - a Latin flavor. A Mercedes Souza voice and twanging Latin acoustic guitars sparkles soften the view. The melody is a real melody (!), with a recurring pattern of a dream. Vibrant and dynamo-like electro acoustics sweeps the song off track, as the music suddenly hints at African lamellaphones and Indonesian gamelan... and a koto spreads Japanese incense and a furious technical industriousness across the horizon... The music gets downright magical and devastatingly illusionary right about here. Stockhausenesque vocal permutations - ring modulations like in "Mixtur" - paints the scenery in fluorescent colors which glow in the silence... Distant choirs of humming monks or demons threaten your security in the frail safety of your listening room. The Pakistani singing commences on a backdrop of a minimalistic, repetitive series of soothing chords; beautiful, consoling. The music conjures up all it's magical might and embraces you in a dream that elevates you into a surreal sensual sensitivity. Liturgical vocal sequences with Iberian fragrances open up the hills and valleys in a splendor of white monasteries and flowing rivers. Layers of musical, historical, cultural styles shift like breaking ice in spring, and you see right through the transparency of vast epochs. Magnificent! Inspiring! Like nothing I've heard! A swirl downward, inward, closes the set in a Saami rite by the fire in the snow, coffee brewing, as shamanistic ecstasy covers your skin with sweat...