Vladiswar Nadishana
The Traditional Music of Ancient Kuzhebar Aborigines
Reviews

MAYBE ANCIENT KUZHEBAR DOESN'T EXIST,
BUT VLADISWAR NADISHANA IS WORTH A LEGEND

author: Billy Sheppard

The world of Vladiswar Nadishana is a magical place. On a dark cynical day in Los Angeles, only the real magic of honest music is worth wading through the myth of world fusion. On a good day a little New Age would do, but the demands of the dismissive darker days would shred the paper thin optimism of hammer dulcimers and echoing wooden flutes of false hope. This Vladiswar guy is made of stronger stuff. Sure, there's a boatload of wooden flutes. His web page is littered with descriptions of the scores of things to pound, pick and blow. His musicianship is legendary and there's a posted myth of Ancient Kuzhebar spun from Siberia through time and teleporting space to support the unlikely existence of this Pan of a pipe player. Nadishana is as hard to believe as he is to resist. He's a multinstrumentalist (!) of impossible diversity, dancer, inventor of something dubbed sound microsurgery as a mixer, and web designer of humbling ability.

Where does he find the time? A myth carrying the torch of an ancient time and space traveling lost Russian cultur of Kuzhebar Aborigines is worth accepting if only to salve pain in wounded self-comparison. He's that musician and composer whose instruments I can't pronounce, whose outlook I can't fathom and a grasp that exceeds the reach of non-enchanted human potential. So, Vladiswar can dance through musical traditions the world over despite the challenge of tonal variations, time signatures that could send Dave Brubeck into a dark depression, and manage to layer that crazy quilt with enough surprises along the way to avoid cloying sweetness and New Age sugar shock with inventive sculpted microsurgical sound design.

He does a duet with a cat! That can't be a good idea, right? Okay, he got the cat song right. Didn't hide the nasty side of the feline. And a little Talk Box or Vocoder employed skillfully makes the song intriguing, if a little disturbing. Here's the deal: he pounds things with authority on stuff that sounds like the Tabla and Tambura, he blows a mean wood flute whatever of a few dozen names he may call the thing, and plucks strings clean, fast and tasteful. All that music may rob you of a bummer. Sad part about it, this music is too creative to be avoided on a dark day. He may bring the world together in your mind on the right day. If that's not what you're after, avoid VH like the bubonic plague. He's infectious.

THE SONGS: HELI-WE APOLINGAYO (WATER SONG) begins spooky and woody in a forest of African voices and rain sticks. Buncha sounds echoing through the subconscious before the hand beat drums and wood flute meander through something like a Panish dream in a valley filled with tactile drums and enchanted thumb pianos. Headphones will take you deep into this enchanted forest with a lot of charming little nuances. Tribal voices chime in Primordial as seasoning.

UNREGULAR DANCE has that country twang from a distant land on the sitar with a crazy assymetrical swing that makes a little 5/4 seem like child's play. All the drums are played by hand with scary dexterous complexity. This one rocks in a scale uncommon to Western ears.

CAT'S LOVE SONG elevates a complaining cat to soloist, with the help of the Talk Box made famous in "Frampton Comes Alive." Stories and songs about pet cats are generally reach the round file half experienced. VH's housecat is a folksinger and collaborator. The good news is he has the decency to include the honest squeal of a cat in complaint. This feline has a little complaint. There's a little Nirvana nastiness in the vocal line from this furry singer.

AEYOLIO SUE sounds like a little hammer dulcimer has infiltrated the music after all! There's a little Celtic feel to this Clannad-like simplicity.

WINTER SONG meanders like the opening to a Raga with the Sarod establishing the mystery and a wooden flute exploring the possibilities. A plucked and resonating chord progression leads into a little ditty about cold wonder

BAGPIPE TUNE is somehow sweet, though I swear that instrument was meant by the Scots to scare the British. Short of the occasional Amazing Grace that instrument is usually a liability. And this tune. Okay, it's charming.

11/16 TUNE takes the table into disarming territory with enough complexity in the time to get past the sweet monitor. Very lyrical. MORNING TUNE is rain stick ghostly and glowing with the swirl of harmonic daybreak clouds. A high sounding flute trumpets the transition from dreaming.

STRAIGHTENING THE MIND (DANCE) drums in a sonic field of ethereal echoplex sounds. Wooden and leather percussion straightens the time with a Kalimba sound that taps along to a solid headspace.

NATIONAL HYMN OF ANCIENT KUZHEBAR is a sad and deep excursion into a region lost to time. This is a folk song sung melodic and harmonized. The strings are strummed and time tapped, with a thud of bass to deepen the experience. A clap along number, if you can count in Huzhebar time

SONG OF UNREGENERATED SINNERS is a dance number with a bowed barn dance of a solo that gets the feet tapping. A brass trumpet joins in the unregenerated romp. Something like a sitar and tabla gets a workout. The joys of sin for a season, perhaps. No shame in that.

Nadishana used: dzuddahord, guitar, sitar, mandola, Bulgarian tambura, fretless bass, double-bass, flute gayda, bansuri, overtone flute, kena, kuzhebar flutes, various percussion, ghost catcher, musorophones, sampler surgery Youl' ~ trumpet, double bass, on track 9, violin on tracks 9 and 4 Yulia Dashevskaya ~ vocal on track 8, Tatyana Gordeeva ~ vocal on track 8 Cat Basik ~ vocal on track 3 Music ~ Nadishana/Kuzhebar traditional, including track 9 ~ Youl'/Nadishana, tracks 4, 7, 8 ~ Yulia Dashevskaya/Nadishana Design ~ Nadishana, cover symbols ~ Yulia Surba Viadiswar's extensive website can be found at: www.nadishana.com

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Great fusion energy the skilled group is able to develop

author: Gerald Van Waes

The most recent CD of Vladiswar starts from the idea of a Kuzhebar musical heritage but performs it rather loosely and beautifully into something spontaneous of his own. This Kuzhebar association refers to an ancient time that dug into the real meanings of things, taking spiritual health and a harmonic place in the environment as an important fundament. Time is not linear in such a society that is able to look back on each object to see if its essence is still there. The music overall is a more independent acoustic jazz fusion using a whole range of instruments with the occasional use of anything from the world's heritage of musical elements from ethnic origin, but without deliberately pushing anything, and with some exceptions digging deeper into some other element of musical style. On the "water song" the singing and vocal harmonies have African elements and a positive celebrative vibe, while the irregular dance has something of a raga fusion, played with his self-build sitar-guitar (?). Highly original is also his "Traditional cat's love song" where he sampled his cat's whining voice and then transforms it into a fake-ethnical instrument. A great modern technique trick that works. The rhythms here are ethnic and modern at the same time, like Peter Gabriel or David Byrne could have worked it out. "Winter Song" is a beautiful and moody minor key track, with sitar (sounding a bit like sitar-guitar), flute and a recognisable jazzy chords building up evolution until the harmonies sets themselves free. The track has a matured calmness of a fusion style I haven't heard in any other track before. "Bagpipe tune" is I think also based upon a spontanuous and inspired improvisation, with jazz fusion band and ethnical percussion instruments. This continues with a similar flavour on "11/6 tune" having elements of Irish (?) and Indian origin well mixed. I think "Imip Yorgi Chetu-rbar" is a medieval-sounding traditional, sung beautifully by Yulia Dashevskaya (?). The song is described as the national hymn of ancient Kuzhebar. The last track mixes earlier elements of semi-Irish, Indian Fusion and jazz in a perfect blend and instrumental improvisation, showing the great fusion energy the skilled group is able to develop. Instruments used in this album are dzuddahord, guitar, sitar, mandola, bulgarian tambura, fretless bass, double-bass, flute, gayda, bansuri, overtone flute, kena, kuzhehar flutes, various percussion, ghost catcher, junkphones, sampler surgery. Youl' played trumpet, double bass and violin, while Yulia Dashevskaya and Tatyana Gordeeva added vocals on some tracks. Also Nadishana's cat Basik had her undeliberate participation in one track.

author: Vargr Wulf (Heathen Harvest)

This is a very eclectic and enjoyable collection of this Russian musician's interpretations of Ancient Kuzhebar Aborigine music, through a very polished European lens. For the most part, these are extremely cleanly recorded and professionally arranged, although there are occasional forays into experimentation. Case in point, the "Kuzhebar Traditional Cat's Love Song" samples a feline voice in somewhat of a post-Coil Sleazy-esque manner, and offers a rather exotic hookah vibe with cherry tobacco flavor. Much of this record would work well as the music for a zoo gift shop or yoga class. Nadishana is a very talented man who has mastery over many instruments, including a "ghost catcher."

I personally would like for this music to be recorded a little bit more raw, as the cleanness of the music causes me to often forget the Aboriginal origin of the contents within. In fact, many of the melodies seem to be 'jazzed-up' quite a bit. Most of the music on here would fit in very well in a coffee-shop environment. Nadishana is no doubt an amazing studio mind, as he is credited with playing 17 different things and they all come together as if a full band is playing these songs live. I will say that this falls pretty far outside the range of music that is typically covered in this magazine.

An amazingly large amount of music on this record could pass for traditional European or Celtic music. The most impressive example of this is track 10, the "National Hymn of Ancient Kuzhebar." With the exception of some background vocal melodies, the average listener would be very unlikely to guess that this was someone performing Aboriginal music. Nadishana has several other records exploring different traditional music of the world, and I would be curious to hear them in relation to this one, as well as hearing field recordings of the traditional versions of these songs. Overall, this record is the work of a talented individual, and is excellent music for a mystic mood.