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CD
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POGUS 21048
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"The Sandokai ('The Harmony of Difference and Equality') is a prayer written by the eighth century Japanese Zen teacher Sekito Kisen. The basis for this piece was a tape given to Wickham-Smith by a nun of a recital at her monastery. He wanted to create of this sample a prayer without borders, a follow-up to an earlier work, 'Ave Regina Caelorum' (2000, released on Extreme Bukake), in which he used the Latin plainsong of a prayer to the Virgin Mary in much the same way. The organ sample at the end is from a piece by Erik Satie, whose spirituality was equally strange and eclectic. All the samples have been stretched and pitch-shifted beyond (immediate) recognition; to the ears they have melded into something that seems at once both ethereal and solid. 'The Kin-kindness of Beforehand' grew out of his 'Multiple Tongues' project, a series of pieces in which Wickham-Smith exposed the spoken word in many different languages to a series of digital manipulations. 'The Kin-kindness of Beforehand' is divided up into several distinct sections, each of which took on a particular persona during its creation. For the composer, this was the most complex of all the 'Multiple Tongues' works, because he wanted to use specific strings of words and the quality of writer Rachel Becker's voice somehow to comment on each another. Love & Lamentation started life as a setting for voice and electronics of part of the biblical Book of Lamentation, but it quickly became clear to that the literal setting of words was not going to convey the melancholic intimacy that needed to be expressed. As a teenager Wickham-Smith had heard Alain Gheerbrant's wonderful ethnomusicological recordings of a blind Turkish troubador and had fallen hopelessly in love with his voice and exquisite playing of the saz. About the same time, through his friend Richard Youngs, he had discovered also the ex tempore psalm singing of the Scottish Isle of Lewis. Fifteen years later, he decided that these two could be made somehow to work together to show the love and lamentation which he felt they both held in their deeper recesses, and which he wanted to present in this new piece. The result is a strange melée of feelings, repetitions and textures."
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VHF 065CD
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"In contrast to the live performance-based pieces on Simon Wickham-Smith's 1999 CD Butterfly Dust, the perversely titled follow-up Extreme Bukake is a dissection of religious music, realized on laptop computer. Traditional components like Catholic hymns and Wickham-Smith's vocal on a Hare Krsna prayer get fragmented, splintered, and reassembled into a rich blob of sound. According to his notes on the tracks, 'The Self-Immolation of Thich Quang Duc' is a programmatic work based around the death of the titular Viêtnamese monk who set himself alight to protest about the activity of the Viêtnamese government in the early 1960s. He was a friend of Thich Nhat Hanh, whom Martin Luther King Jr. nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. The music sounds like the insanity of the situation, the external noise of cars and people and the internal noise of the heart and the soul of this man. 'Sri Guru Vandana' is a song from the Hare Krsna (ISKCON) tradition of Krisna Vaisnavitism, a nod in the direction of Wickham-Smith's pre-Buddhist, teenager self, the young man who got into ISKCON and then freaked out at the evangelical nature of the organization. This track acknowledges the positive side of his experience. 'Ave Regina Celorum' is based on a Catholic hymn to Mary, an attempt to create a piece which could perhaps be used for meditation, either formal or informal."
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VHF 044CD
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"The first solo CD by Simon Wickham-Smith follows a long and prolific 10 year recording partnership with Richard Youngs. Recorded during a temporary relocation to Australia, Butterfly Dust is a strikingly intimate solo performance on organ, voice, Peruvian Reed, and didgeridoo. The performances here are informed by a rare combination of virtuosity and exploratory improvisation. In comparison with some prior performances (e.g. Simon's startlingly skilled assault on a grand piano on Knish), Butterfly Dust is in a more minimal style, where sounds are given room to build up and establish a mood over the long term. This is particularly true of the long organ solo "Objects Appearing", where notes are slowly added to a drone over a period of several minutes, giving each newly introduced note a significant impact."
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