|
The
Tunnel Singer is Lee Ellen Shoemaker, a San Francisco chanteuse
who converts the most banal constructions of humans into the
most resonant and ambient of instruments. Using her voice alone,
Shoemaker finds structures such as cisterns and bomb shelters
with natural reverberations, then weaves an improvisational
composition to create an aria of transcendent, meditative chants.
Water
Birth is her latest CD, recorded in a two-million gallon cistern
under the ground in Fort Worden, Washington, and it is shocking
in its ability to transport you to another universe. Built during
World War I out of cement, the cistern itself, like the parking
garages and artillery shelters that have inspired her previous
albums, was a silent beast until Shoemaker stepped into it and
discovered its forty-five second reverb abilities.
Singing
without known language and allowing herself to improvise according
to the resonations of the cistern, the Tunnel Singer uses the
structure meant to hold water to evoke the dramatic symbology
of that element: birth, regeneration, fertility, unending expanse,
and unconquerable force. Each track merges into the next, creating
a symphony that undulates and transports the listener entirely
out of the land-locked world.
All
expectations about music must be put aside while listening to
Water Birth; Shoemaker's ethereal ability to forge a dramatic
universe out of the silence of the abandoned cistern speaks
volumes not only of her incredible talent, but also of the realization
that music exists in everything, and is just waiting to be found
and heard. Under the water, all known sounds become strange,
movements are slowed, and what has been heavy on land suddenly
floats.
Water
Birth suspends you just below the surface of the water, looking
up to the world above which is blurred and silent. A total and
unknown world teems around you, previously distant but waiting
to be discovered. The Tunnel Singer is your captain as you chart
these new horizons, and her art is best understood as a hymn
to the music that exists in all earthly things.
|
