Angels of ice and fire

It’s not every day that you get to hear a harpist with an equally sanguine voice, and Noelle Cassandra has just that in her first eponymously titled album under Dyna Records, in the process taking the instrument out of the hotel lobby and into its more private, smoky lounge. No more will we have nightmares of Tadao Hayashi, may he rest in peace, the Japanese who transformed harp music into a household fixture, even long after he was mysteriously murdered in his Manila suburb home some years ago.

Noelle Cassandra has the added gift of also being able to write her own music and, hear this, sing some of her songs solo, in a duet or as backup. When we hear harps, we think of angels, and half the songs in the CD that have vocals have the voice of angels.

Of course, I never thought I’d see the day that I’d have humming in my head a song from Cassandra’s crossing, You’re the One I Need, but she can get to you when you least expect it, and see the following too as visions to the accompanying soundtrack: maybe Sandara Park left with the cake out in the rain, and Hero Angeles stuttering his erratic love for her.

Half the album that are instrumentals work just as well if not better than the songs with vocals, mainly because John Lesaca’s violin takes up the slack and engages in fine interplay with harp, with the players losing none of their intensity. The instrumental remixes of two earlier songs with vocals serve not only as minus one type karaoke, but make us bask in the very subtlety of the harp. While hard boiled critics may as well dismiss the CD as cheesy, the music of Noelle Cassandra is definitely an acquired taste, and which however may haunt the unwary listener in its own good time.

The harp notes of the classically-trained young woman continue to tickle the ear drums better than any reflexology.

Another type of angel, this time the fallen one, inhabits the independently produced CD Dekoding Rhythm by the hip-house, acid jazz ensemble Ampon. Comprised mostly of teenage misfits with too much rapping rhymes in their hands, Ampon reworks the dark side of ghetto rap, and with an insistent bass guitar and heartbeat of a snare drum, manages to get into the listener’s system.

Most of the lyrics are understated and angry, with a careful ear not to be too didactic, though at their age it’s difficult not to. Titles are provocative and also playful, as in Holografiction.

The names taken on by the group members (Flexx, Anygma, Beetlejuice, etc.) show how immersed they are in this counter-culture, and if we wonder late at night what our kids are listening to and find out it’s Ampon, then there’s hope that they might just have themselves adopted to something useful.

Acid jazz itself has limited practitioners here in the country, such that Ampon certainly fills a void. It’s not even obvious that these young post-punks are relatively green behind the ears – to mix figures of speech – so comfortably have they slipped into their chosen persona. If there might be some discrepancy of the well-to-do rapping about the life of the have-nots, it is best to remember that even in the material world not everything comes in the coin of currency.

Meanwhile, speaking of ice and fire a class at the UP College of Mass Communications has decided to walk the thin line and produce a classical album featuring mostly musicians from University of Sto. Tomas Conservatory of Music and a few from UP College of Music, entitled Classicology: Bow String Soul, released some months ago.

For those tired of the usual pap heard on the airwaves and CD stores, Classicology offers a different fare and approach to the music of the ages, tapping the talents of impressionable young students partial to the classics, such as the works of Sor and Faure.

So we get to hear a sampling from the masters as interpreted by young hands, guitars and violins in their respective atonal charts and stuff. It’s not every day that students produce a work by students of another university, with the market not necessarily of that age bracket.

Too long have we been deprived of classical music without the Christian orthodox trappings as in dzFE. With Classicology, we get the good deed minus the do-good frills. Even Perf de Castro, former lead guitarist of Rivermaya, found his way back to the classics eventually. It was Perf’s way of getting back to where he once belonged, music that is the root of his soul.