Zosha Warpeha - silver dawn

ATTN:Magazine

silver dawn by Zosha Warpeha

Absence is everywhere. The solo improvisations on silver dawn are littered with respiratory pauses as if Zosha Warpeha were playing brass or woodwind, with passages of expression alternating with passages of quiet. Bowed fiddle mimics the sound of inhalation, lowered to a rasp akin to hissing through teeth. At these moments I imagine Warpeha to be contemplating the rich constitution of her present: nurturing shape of the melody just expressed, preparing to play it again, and considering how minuscule fluctuations in her disposition may generate disparities between the two. Each repetition may possess the general shape of the instance prior – often swoops between a mere handful of pitches, ornamented with sudden flutters – but each instance is augmented with the energy unique to a mindful inhabitation of the now. These improvisations are like symbols painted repeatedly upon a canvas, with new curves and lines traced approximately over the old. Yet there are deviations everywhere: little upward licks and serifs that decorate the thickly-asserted imprint of the overall shape, evidencing the undulation of circumstance that presses upon a given trajectory through time. Warpeha doesn’t need to stop and breathe to play her instrument, and yet she does: brush held above the canvas, allowing a radiant intentionality to seep into that gap between one gesture concluding and the next gesture commencing.

Specifically, Warpeha plays the Hardanger d’amore: a fiddle with similarities to the Norwegian hardingfele and Baroque viola d’amore, whose five bowed strings are each paired with a sympathetic string that activates through nearby vibration. On close scrutiny one can hear little afterglows of resonance, as though part of the instrument is savouring the shape of certain notes before they pass altogether. Such suspension is found also in the melodies themselves. Even the more overt tonal centres on tracks such as “dreamt the raven” never come to rest, stumbling upon new queries in each attempt to resolve themselves. Pieces like “first light” resemble two outstretches hands just out of touching distance, the fingers playfully twitching toward contact, with a beautiful charge emerging from this jostle of intimacy and the intangible. Warpeha’s voice features occasionally, effectively adopting the role of a sixth sympathetic string as it swoops in wordless parallel to her instrument. During “of the mountain ash”, we hear it gradually decouple from the rasp of the bow and move toward fullness and agency, tracing its own arc above the central drone, and above the interwoven brambles of finger-plucked strings. Yet this gathering conviction remains in the spirit of inquiry, with open vowels evoking not the expression of an answer, but in the eternal rearrangement of the question.

A Closer Listen

An old truth runs through the systems of folk musics: art belongs to everyone, and it is never truly made in isolation. Every melody holds a vast, remote knowledge, a singularity expressed in the moment of playing, each musician embodying a new version of it that is also as ancient as the community for whose ears it becomes immediately intimate. Zosha Warpeha, of US origin, spent some time in Norway learning its folk traditions, particularly those related to the hardanger fiddle, an instrument first registered in the 17th century, its body transformed into a cousin of the violin in the 19th. It is characterized by having sympathetic strings, a set of understrings that pick up the vibrations of notes played, producing an accompanying resonance reinforcing the main tones. Voices within voices, sounds making themselves, versions of the same notes occurring simultaneously; a choir of one would be a good starting point to talk about the folk musician, and the hardanger as an instrument reflects this real-time entwining of old and new.

Every hardanger style involves player foot-stomping, a folk dancing hallmark across many contexts, but that in this case speaks to the relationship between musician and instrument as itself sympathetic, both bodies as living resonance boxes, an assemblage of vibrant movements (bow swings, head bobs, feet stepping around, strings undulating, wood transforming sound waves…). Warpeha’s learning process was practical, an artisanal relationship to both the music and the tools to make it, an organic pedagogy in which the mind and body divide makes little sense, where expression is not solely found in the production of sounds, but in the environments they ultimately develop in. The metaphor of a musician becoming a vehicle for something transcendental is by now cliché, but it is in folk music where such a thing materializes and becomes real, an interplay less of “spirit” and person, and more of person and history, community and memory. The assemblage of movements is deep knowledge actualized, relationships renewed, connections deepened. It is interesting, in this regard, that Warpeha chose not the hardanger as her extension of self-toward-others, but the hardanger d’amore, first crafted in 2010 by Salve Håkedal. Like other “amore instruments”, it is a variation, an echo projected as sweeter and smoother than the originals. It is itself an actualization, a contemporary recipient of remote knowledge, put in motion, in this case, by Warpeha.

The resulting music flows like a daydream, a coincidence between now and some other, deeper time. It emerges from the confluence of two contemporaneities – the folk that Warpeha and her instrument come to embody, and the modernist tradition that seeks not the singularity of variation, but the singularity of renewed relationships between sounds. Significantly, there’s no foot-stomping here, so the focus is not on the immediacy of the environment in which the sounds of folk resonate with the community’s memory; instead, Warpeha’s voice often serves as accompaniment, like the intimate hums with which we vibrate to the music that we like. The instrument is still an extension, the whole an assemblage, but the ideal is to transform your body into that environment, the echo chamber in which the sounds deployed acquire meaning, rooted in the long-gone past as much as in the present, your self-knowledge mixing up with that of peoples you might not have contact with. We trace Warpeha’s own travels, except the album format turns the journey inward, a sympathetic vibration produced at even the most incredible of distances.

The pieces in silver dawn are all improvised, the result of experimenting with the multiple tunings of the hardanger d’amore. Warpeha moves deliberately, slowly, through each note, so as to guide us through the creation of beautiful harmonics, each sound and its echo given room to develop at once. It appeals to memory of a different sort, a community molded by modernist attention to detail, an active meditation entranced by drones, by dissonance, by subtle silences, by unexpected shifts. You can hear the artist use extended techniques, plucking the strings or harshly pressing the bow, the singularity of her playing producing not so much a version or an experience of the newly unique, but something different. It ends up cutting across folk and modernism, those tapestries of bodily expression, and suggesting something akin to a fractal: it sounds like a music you’ve heard before, but close attention results in perceiving its apparent slight changes as profoundly significant. It grows from Warpeha’s multiplicity, her voices within voices, and our ways of listening, ears within ears, a folk-turned-modern and a modern-turned-folk music. As history courses through her assemblage, we receive and transform it through our understanding, the joy and the melancholy of every piece resulting from our own self-knowledge, drawn upon our psyche in real-time like dancers tracing relationships to place in every step, every twist, every sweep along a room. A grand choir of one, singing for a full, vibrant audience of one. (David Murrieta Flores)