Diamanda’s live performance of this album, which I recently saw, sounded just as perfect as the CD, as clear, as detailed and as virtuose, while still feeling close, a warm human being guiding you into her multi-layered sound world. Trained as a classical violinist, and a great singer, Diamanda La Berge Dramm is at home in the American avant-garde, knows the new music world inside out and deeply loves alternative pop. All these influences can be found in her music; not necessarily referenced, but filtered into a highly personal idiom: direct and natural.

The songs are based on texts by British avant-garde poet Steven J Fowler, with whom Dramm has a longstanding collaboration. She specifically used texts from Fowler’s books “I Will Show You the Life of the Mind (on Perscription Drugs)” and “The Great Apes”. Dramm brings these two works together through a suggested image: the world of waiting rooms enfolds the world of the apes. The themes are concrete, but their implementation is highly poetic which gives Dramm’s music all the more space. The listener is guided, through text and sound, into the jungle universe of the apes and its various characters. Eventually we are ejected back out into the real world, hearing a similar music with which we started. But this time, with the monkeys in hindsight, it is a slightly tilted reality.

Tracklist

1. born 03:24
2. horse 04:30
3. voices 03:50
4. jungle 02:35
5. Chimp is who 03:38
6. Gorilla, CEO 04:24
7. Bonobo’s on time 01:44
8. Orangut, the Orangutan 03:20
9. more voices 01:21
10. 12 ways 04:36
11. memory 02:08

Diamanda La Berge Dramm: voice, violin, Moog
Words by Steven J. Fowler.