Tamia
Pierre Favre
Solitudes

Tamia voice
Pierre Favre percussion
Recorded April 1991 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Tamia and partner Pierre Favre continue the love letter begun in de la nuit … le jour with Solitudes. Tamia opens this even deeper dive in “Chant d’Exil” by wrapping her astonishing voice around a thread-like drone. Favre’s malleted energy unspools into a glassine bone walk of private ritual. And there it ends, leaving us in the silent answer from which “Drame” unmasks its rasps and gongs. Tamia upends the water’s waking dreams, singing of sulfur and magma, in places where lullabies can be sung only to the dead. The thin drone of circumstance returns in “Clair -­ obscur.” It is a circle under a microscope slide filled with cytoplasmic ululations, a flute hollowed out from a tree branch and smeared along a copper sky. That voice rises from its chorused depths like a flock of recorders. “Pluies” is a percussion-only piece, dancing between a drum’s low beat and the metallic swirl of cymbals. Amphibian croaks and avian cackles draw themselves into a fading tail-wisp of bowed gongs. Shades of Meredith Monk abound in “Allegria,” an interlude to the electrifying sprawl of “Erba Luce.” Over the slow arpeggios of “Sables” Tamia connects her dots all the way to the title track, which sings through a solemn organ pulled down from the sky and made earthly through breath alone. Tamia extends the threads of her craft through its intangible pillars for a mythology that echoes far into the icy silence of our future.

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