duggup

Artist: David Antony Clark
Website: www.davidantonyclark.com
Track Name: Shaman Dancing
Playback: mp3
Download?: Yes

This artist is, I suppose a little off my usual beaten path (eh, you haven’t noticed my dirty great tracks through the field of music then?), but listening to just one 50 second sample from the webpage was enough to set me dancing around the loungeroom.

David Antony Clark is a New Zealander with wandering feet and a fine sensibilty for writing music that energises while simultaneously laying a soothing paw on your brow. It doesn’t stop there though. He has recorded material from far flung places and absorbed influences from most of them. The result is his latest album Shaman Dancing, one of several that he has produced over the years.

Each track is an amazing blend of animal and environmental sounds together with mesmerising percussive pulses, exotic synth embellishments and lush instrumentation.

I regret that the website only has four samples from the seven quite lengthy tracks each of around 7 minutes or even longer. If, unlike myself, you are in the US you can listen to the whole album at Rhapsody Online.

Several of the chants on Shaman Dancing are based on the ancient Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. PIE, is the reconstructed ancestral language of all the Indo-European tongues which include Latin, Sanskrit, Hindi, English, German, Spanish etc.

David has used agreed PIE root words and a possible grammar for his ancient yet oddly familiar-sounding chants and vocalisations. Tibetan, another Indo-European language, can be heard on The Lake of Souls & The Garden of Visions and Chief Dancing Thunder calls the ancestors with a Susquehannock chant on the title track Shaman Dancing.

David calls his music ‘neo primal’ and that’s as good a label as any. The title track Shaman Dancing featuring a Susquehannock chant performed by Chief Dancing Thunder is my pick from the samples on offer although the sample doesn’t really do it justice.