Zosha Warpeha ~ silver dawn

An old truth runs through the systems of folk musics: art belongs to everyone, and it is never truly made in isolation. Every melody holds a vast, remote knowledge, a singularity expressed in the moment of playing, each musician embodying a new version of it that is also as ancient as the community for whose ears it becomes immediately intimate. Zosha Warpeha, of US origin, spent some time in Norway learning its folk traditions, particularly those related to the hardanger fiddle, an instrument first registered in the 17^th century, its body transformed into a cousin of the violin in the 19^th. It is characterized by having sympathetic strings, a set of understrings that pick up the vibrations of notes played, producing an accompanying resonance reinforcing the main tones. Voices within voices, sounds making themselves, versions of the same notes occurring simultaneously; a choir of one would be a good starting point to talk about the folk musician, and the hardanger as an instrument reflects this real-time entwining of old and new.

Every hardanger style involves player foot-stomping, a folk dancing hallmark across many contexts, but that in this case speaks to the relationship between musician and instrument as itself sympathetic, both bodies as living resonance boxes, an assemblage of vibrant movements (bow swings, head bobs, feet stepping around, strings undulating, wood transforming sound waves…). Warpeha’s learning process was practical, an artisanal relationship to both the music and the tools to make it, an organic pedagogy in which the mind and body divide makes little sense, where expression is not solely found in the production of sounds, but in the environments they ultimately develop in. The metaphor of a musician becoming a vehicle for something transcendental is by now cliché, but it is in folk music where such a thing materializes and becomes real, an interplay less of “spirit” and person, and more of person and history, community and memory. The assemblage of movements is deep knowledge actualized, relationships renewed, connections deepened. It is interesting, in this regard, that Warpeha chose not the hardanger as her extension of self-toward-others, but the hardanger d’amore, first crafted in 2010 by Salve Håkedal. Like other “amore instruments”, it is a variation, an echo projected as sweeter and smoother than the originals. It is itself an actualization, a contemporary recipient of remote knowledge, put in motion, in this case, by Warpeha.

The resulting music flows like a daydream, a coincidence between now and some other, deeper time. It emerges from the confluence of two contemporaneities – the folk that Warpeha and her instrument come to embody, and the modernist tradition that seeks not the singularity of variation, but the singularity of renewed relationships between sounds. Significantly, there’s no foot-stomping here, so the focus is not on the immediacy of the environment in which the sounds of folk resonate with the community’s memory; instead, Warpeha’s voice often serves as accompaniment, like the intimate hums with which we vibrate to the music that we like. The instrument is still an extension, the whole an assemblage, but the ideal is to transform your body into that environment, the echo chamber in which the sounds deployed acquire meaning, rooted in the long-gone past as much as in the present, your self-knowledge mixing up with that of peoples you might not have contact with. We trace Warpeha’s own travels, except the album format turns the journey inward, a sympathetic vibration produced at even the most incredible of distances.

The pieces in silver dawn are all improvised, the result of experimenting with the multiple tunings of the hardanger d’amore. Warpeha moves deliberately, slowly, through each note, so as to guide us through the creation of beautiful harmonics, each sound and its echo given room to develop at once. It appeals to memory of a different sort, a community molded by modernist attention to detail, an active meditation entranced by drones, by dissonance, by subtle silences, by unexpected shifts. You can hear the artist use extended techniques, plucking the strings or harshly pressing the bow, the singularity of her playing producing not so much a version or an experience of the newly unique, but something different. It ends up cutting across folk and modernism, those tapestries of bodily expression, and suggesting something akin to a fractal: it sounds like a music you’ve heard before, but close attention results in perceiving its apparent slight changes as profoundly significant. It grows from Warpeha’s multiplicity, her voices within voices, and our ways of listening, ears within ears, a folk-turned-modern and a modern-turned-folk music. As history courses through her assemblage, we receive and transform it through our understanding, the joy and the melancholy of every piece resulting from our own self-knowledge, drawn upon our psyche in real-time like dancers tracing relationships to place in every step, every twist, every sweep along a room. A grand choir of one, singing for a full, vibrant audience of one. (David Murrieta Flores)