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ARTIST
TITLE
Sokut
FORMAT
CD
LABEL
CATALOG #
N 007CD
N 007CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
5/2/2006
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"Saam Schlamminger's music negates the dialogue of cultures. Dialogue means one of you over here, the other over there, and now get along with each other. In that kind of scenario, being forced into subjects, cultures can only operate as caricatures. Applied to music, the result sounds as you would expect: Western blandness in Southern or Eastern gravy. Or the other way round: beats that don't bring more world into folklore. There are, of course, exceptions, great encounters. But they don't draw their life from cultures or collectives, they draw it from firmly rooted individuals who finally grow beyond themselves. They can complement each other, steal from each other, grow together to form something new, at best become a whole that was never heard before -- but in so doing, they have left dialogue behind. It might seem to be dialogue, but in fact it is a many-voicedness, many voices that become an orchestra instead of simply talking to each other. Saam Schlamminger has gone even farther. In his music, dialogue is revoked. All is one, but nothing surrenders itself. It is not possible to distinguish origins. Almost everything seems to be Western, everything exotic is deliberately avoided, but in its core the music is more oriental than belly-dance. If you abandon yourself to the pulse of the beats, you recognize the Santour, the Persian hammered dulcimer. In the shimmer of the electronics you can hear the echo of the Tombak, the oriental drum. Saam doesn't embellish himself with Eastern accessories (although he can deploy them masterfully); he doesn't take on the forms of the East, but rather its structures, thoughts, and a philosophy of playing that is specific and universal at the same time. Saam's music is Eastern by being Western. Or the other way round. I don't know. Dr. Navid Kermani Publisher and Expert in Islam (e.g. Das Buch der von Neil Young Getöteten) World music is not from this world. But prevalently from a virtual space nobody really wants to live in. Let's cling to and abide by the following: world equals world plus man. Saam Schlamminger is a human of Persian origin and the music he composed and realized on his recent album Sokut definitely stems from this world. This, that is, another. A world where directions are right, because there are none. In which the desert of the digital manifests itself analogically. Populated by the Babylonians of bass, the slide Semites and beat Bedouins, the fictitious protagonists of some kind of musical invocation, inside of which -- climaxing -- orient and occident, gently rocking in the pace of the epic mystic measure of Mesopotamia, wish each other a good night. Schlamminger's music is democratic-fantastic in the same sense Weilheim's music scene is, the place where he lives and continuously entangles eastern Western and western Eastern like a visionary magus. Chronomad's Sokut seems oddly familiar while striking the notes for a wide and hardly conquered but already misunderstood genre. Those listeners of today and the last 8000 years who always parsed history and fake oriental records for the remains of this exotic arithmetic in rhythm and tone will welcome Chronomad with open ears. This is ritual music ignoring the superfluousity of rituals."
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