Kronos Quartet - Black Angels
It's easy to rag on Kronos Quartet. As far as ensembles go, they are annoyingly omnipresent celebrities. They've done some really cool things, such as their weird thing with the Tiger Lillies, but like i've already mentioned you can get tired of their versions of stuff real quick. They are the Leonardo DiCaprio of string quartets.
Speaking of Inception, Kronos Quartet exists because David Harrington heard George Crumb's Black Angels and decided forming a string quartet to play radical Avant Garde stuff like that was his purpose in life. 10 albums later they finally recorded it.
I made an album called Album of Death, but it's a joke compared to this monstrosity of all the darkest terror humans can create for each other (it's a joke in its own right because all the pieces are those tacky euphamisms we like to use, but that's beside the point). What else should go on an album whose title track is a direct artistic statement about the then currently happening Vietnam don't call it a War built around the numerological structures of 7 and 13?
The answer, of course, is other random pieces about war. Tallis's Spem In Allum is based on a text from the story of Judith beheading Holofernes during Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Bethulia. Marta used two songs from field recordings he made in an unincorporated village in Romania, whose inhabitants were subsequently rounded up and their village destroyed to supposedly build a power plant (like speed, ethnomusicology kills). They actually sent a letter to him saying never come back to Romania, thanks. Not surprisingly, the two songs are about death and war. Ives wrote "They are There" about WWI in 1917, coincidentally the year before Debussy died. Then in 1942 we decided to do the sequel, so he changed a few lyrics and republished it. Yes, that's actually Ives singing with quartet overdubbed to match.
And just when you thought it was safe to come out of the water in your itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini (it's 1960 after all) Shostokovich writes the Purple People Eater (1958) of string quartets and dedicates it to the victims of fascism and war. Don't believe me that Shostokovich's 8th and Itsy...Bikini were created within a month or two of each other? Go look it up. My question is, which one actually took conceptually longer to write? If it took Vance and Pockriss longer than 12 minutes, then i'd say Shosti's 3 days is the clear winner by comparison. His symphonies were tombstones, and the 8th String Quartet is for everyone who vanished without a trace under both Hitler and Stalin. It's by far my favorite string quartet of all time, followed pretty closely by the quartets of Irwin Schulhoff and Silvestre Revueltas.
Honesty time, i've heard about 7,000 performances of Shostokovich's 8th quartet, but my favorite by miles was from a random youtube video by some high school students. Kronos is somewhere in the top 200.
My point is that this is a heavy album. Like, Crowbar heavy. We start with calling UH-1 Hueys "electric insects" and we end up at the testimony of a man who lived in personal fear of Stalin disappearing him if he didn't "Happy Happy Joy Joy" the everloving crap out of everything (yay Ren and Stimpy, boo despotism). Volkov's book is about as authentic as Schindler's writings about Beethoven, but you learn really early on that biographies and memoires are more about how their subject and author wanted to be perceived rather than what they actually said or really felt. Remember, less about the thing, more about the effect it produces. This album gives me tingly nightmare goosebumps. I'm not entirely sure whether it was Mr. Dumb or Mr. Dumber who said "i like it a lot."
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