REVIEW: Jeremiah Cymerman’s “Purification/Dissolution”

For the new album by Jeremiah Cymerman, he shows once again why he is one of the more innovative musicians and composers of our

time. What may begin as a simple concept of playing the clarinet in front of a microphone hooked up to a laptop can turn into something extraordinary, mindbending, and overwhelming, but if you have come to enjoy and put faith in Cymerman and his work, then Purification/Dissolution (5049) is an album where the reward will be as moving and powerful as the music which came before.

For this one, it seems Cymerman is committed to putting a bit of anger into his music, or at least that’s how the album begins with the title track. It comes off like a modern version of Terry Kath’s “Free Form Guitar” (from the first Chicago Transit Authority album), and for me I wondered if this is meant to be an introductory statement, a mixture of distorted clarinet amped up to sound like a feedback-ridden guitar made merely to create feedback-ridden sounds, or both? The clarinet squeals are played over a solitary drone, and it leans towards the drone metal side of things. One can concentrate on the meditative drone, but the loose distorted clarinet has something else in mind. Does the search for a solid note mean that this is the process of finding purity, or is this the dissolution of purity and solitude? It welcomes the listener into a very uncertain album, but if the first track is a sense of darkness to be explored, one must walk further into the unknown.

“Charnel Ground” now has the monotonous drone moving and vibrating into different things, adn Cymerman’s clarinet work becomes a bit more sensible and fluid, although one can interpret the sounds as uncontrolled sirens. Is this a reference to the nuclear disaster of Japan, perhaps the rapid thoughts of one realizing their fate up to the moment of an ultimate conclusion? Or dissolution? “Secret Refuse (For Adam Yauch)” is a beautiful piece, its calm feel sounds like nothing more than Cymerman on a boat (or on a mountain top, with some of the effects of what sounds like a boat on water, or wind blowing through the trees) playing a composition of warmth, acknowledgment, and perhaps a spiritual passage spoken without words, as if he is merging their shared Jewish upbringing and merging it with touches of Yauch’s Buddhist beliefs. It’s oting, it can be considered a unique means of showing props, but it’s the first moment of solitude on Purification/Dissolution.

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