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home > music >
 MAENAD
A Thousand Petals
2001
Refined Clinical Research
46:48
Listening to this, in physical and emotional shock from prolonged exposure
to the dentist's drill, the relationship between music and medicine -
which might at other times seem obscure - is suddenly clarified. The smudged
and muffled world portrayed in this recording is a twilight place to which
the body retreats when it is in pain. Half-heard voices, snatches of piano,
rumbles of thunder, birds and passing cars - outside the world carries
on, while inside I lie drugged up to the eyeballs, inclined to tears,
vaguely aware of the sophisticated, necessary, evils perpetrated upon
my mouth. Christine M. Uberti (Maenad) has a medical background,
and has also travelled extensively: as with her previous disc Flowers
for Solomon pain never seems far away in her music, which often also
has a wailing, mournful Eastern tinge to it. Suffering. Confusion. Resentment.
Misunderstanding. The darker side, the thin line between life and death,
always lurking, comes suddenly closer with the final track of the four
presented here: 'Pigs May Fly', with its references to ritual murder,
Satanism, torture, blood sacrifice and "smiling corpses". The voice describing
all this weaves in and out, shuddering with distortion and half-drowned
in an uneasy sea of electronic drift. Thoughtful, absorbing stuff - an
alternative world of muddy swirl, permanently out of focus and puzzling,
spooky.
STEWART GOTT - 11 April 2002
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