CD – Twin Paradox

In Cosmo Tengri, the Kazakh sound artist Angelina Yershova is deeply engaged in the terrestrial ecosystem: deforestation, sustainability and the preservation of nature. In the video that accompanies the album’s first track, “Korgau”, the refined experimentalist immediately shows her affinity with and attention to these subjects. The video features the environmental activist Saltanat Tashimova and was shot in the Ile-Alatau National Park, specifically in the upland plain “Kok Zhailau”, which this initial composition is dedicated to. The atmospheres seem to be permeated by ancient symbolic meanings. The erectness of the trees ideally sets the link between the telluric phase and the sky, while the sounds on play evoke some temporal suspensions and thoughts about the impermanence and the subtle modulations of these ongoing transformations. Beginning with the fragility of our planet, the album offers a radical change of inner awareness, a new relational engagement with nature and the environment. What is transient is suffering, yet, at the same time, proof of a world in change. This brings us to a cosmology where there is “Tengri”, the superior entity, the God of the blue sky, worshiped by the warriors of the steppe, the defender of equilibrium and harmony. The Altaic countries of Central Asia are experiencing a rebirth of shamanism and tengrism, a cultural, rather than religious, phenomenon, easily linked to a cosmopolitan ethical environmentalism. This is a metaphorical suggestion present across all of the recordings. Religion and magic, the transcendental and the immanent are crossed by some contemporary rhythmical caesura and seem to coexist in the cuts as dialectic poles of a sacred experience. Sometimes the voice of Yershova whispers what many may take to be occult and mystical sentiments, close to world music but at the same time intimate, melancholic and mellow. One strength of the album is its focus on the tension between acoustics and electronic instrumentation. This is seen in the ritualistic and fascinating flux of the sound sequences, which are never ordinary or excessive in their spiritual pulses. In Cosmo Tengri, Yershova leaves her usual instrument, the piano, to embrace a large variety of sounds and audio constructions, often made by field recordings and organic elements, in an eternal fight between dissipation, degeneration of matter and environmentally responsible awareness.

 

Angelina Yershova – Cosmo Tengri