Music Reviews from the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House

May 15, 2025
Balss un rezonanse - Eleonora Kampe
Label: Sāpes Skaņas
Catalog #: SSSS-034
Location: Riga, Latvia
Release Date: May 21, 2025
Media: digital download & cassette
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discogs.com entry

The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House begin this review with a reminder of their general disclaimer when it comes to music reviews. We reproduce the disclaimer in its entirety below.

Disclaimer: Lest readers be misled, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House do not place any great weight on the words in any of the reviews on the PPPH blog. The music exists outside these reviews and is neither magnified nor diminished by it. Because we have nothing essential to add, we sometimes find ourselves asking, "Why do we continue to write music reviews?"

The answer we suppose is identified by analogy. When you walk alone along a path and come upon a flower in full bloom you might share a memory or a photograph with someone, who will find the same pleasure in the scent or the folds and color of the petals. Or, if the flowers grow in a wild place, you might even cut some and place them in a vase on the kitchen table, where their fragrance permeates the house. As we write it, the answer seems obvious and this explanation unnecessary; still we are moved to include the disclaimer as a way of expressing the intention behind this collection of inconsequential reviews.

Balss un rezonanse is an album in which a human vocalist collaborated with various buildings in Riga, Latvia to create an album containing nine duets, in which the vocalist remains the same for each track but partners with a different structure. The idea of exploring a space with music is not new to us. (For example, we think fondly of Un Autre Chemin Vers L'Ultime in which Keiji Haino, dark shaman of the Japanese underground, used his voice to explore caves and churches in France.) However, as we all already know, the human voice is a versatile instrument, capable of a range of expression limited only by the imagination. The approach of vocalist, Eleonora Kampe, is not like anything we heard before.

For a few days, the thinking organ inside our heads could not process her voice. We had never heard of Eleonora Kampe or her music. We stupidly thought it too "classical". But like the best music, her music defied understanding. Day after day, we kept going back to it, trying to understand what it was that she was doing. Ultimately, we ended up compelled to put a forward a few words about Balss un rezonanse, although the reader should accept that we cannot provide any unambiguous insight into the motivations of the artist—only our individual conjecture, as likely as not to be wrong. In doing so, we remembered the great joy in learning about a musician new to our ears through an unexpected piece of music.

photograph: Liene Drāzniece

We begin with a couple descriptions of the physical reality of the music. It is solo voice and the reverbation is due to the natural acoustics of the space in which the recording was made. According to the highest ideal of improvisation, the interaction between the musician and the environment is captured in a single take, without overdubbing. After the first couple listens, we tried to form analogies with sounds that were already known to our ears. When one runs a finger over a partially filled wine glass, one can generate a resonance in a range apparent to the human ear. At times, we heard sounds reminiscent of such singing goblets, except its origin came from the animate rather than inanimate world. Upon subsequent listenings, we heard sounds that reminded us of echoes in recordings of whale song. For those who suppose that there is not much overlap between singing goblets and whale song, we are pleased to have accurately conveyed some mysterious element of this music.

Each of the nine tracks on Balss un rezonanse is titled with an identification of the structure in which the recording was made. We like this meta-information regarding the music very much. As we have noted before, when an artist gives a title to a piece of instrumental music that connects the music to some other historical event, the imagination of the listener imbues that music with whatever emotional import is associated with the event. (We think again of American trumpeter, Wadada Leo Smith, who frequently titles tracks of instrumental music with historical events associated with the Civil Rights movement.) On Balss un rezonanse, Eleonara Kampe invokes the embedded predilections, conscious or subconscious, that a listener has with the notions of a church, chapel, fortress, museum and prison in which the music was recorded. In particular, four tracks were recorded in four different prison cells of The Corner House—a former KGB detention center that during Soviet period was located in an apartment building with columns and balconies built in 1912. We hear in her voice the lamentation of the lives that languished in those cells.

As a final addendum, we note that in the United States, we learn about Latvia (if we learn about it at all) only as one of three Baltic States, along with Lithuania & Estonia. We have a modest experience with music from Lithuania because of NoBusiness Records run out of Vilnius. To our knowledge, we have only ever heard one album released in Estonia and that was because locals, Taavi Kerikmäe and Mart Soo, invited a favorite non-idomatic vocalist, Isabelle Duthoit, to collaborate on a release in Tallinn. As best we can tell, Balss un rezonanse is the first time we have listened to music from Latvia. We can only say, what an incredible introduction! Naturally, we now imagine Latvia as a country filled with voices of singing goblets and whale songs freeing old memories from former prison cells. If our understanding of the music of Latvia is incomplete, please allow to make this discovery at our own pace, as we are happy to maintain our misconception for a while longer.

personnel:

• Eleonora Kampe (voice) musician's social media

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