Kronos Quartet + Mary Kouyoumdjian
Witness
PHENOTYPIC
Going back to early albums such as 1985’s Monk Suite (with Ron Carter) and Cadenza on the Night Plain (with Terry Riley), the Kronos Quartet have always been confident in their might and invention—enough so to welcome full-blown collaboration as part of their portrayal of new music and contemporary classicism. Founding violinist David Harrington (now with violinist Gabriela Díaz, violist Ayane Kozasa, and cellist Paul Wiancko) is like the Travis Scott of the avant-garde: forever finding the coolest someone for that prime, whack feature.
Recorded in tribute to the victims of the Armenian genocide, Witness and its pensive, unsteadying sentiment sees the quartet working with documentarian-composer and Pulitzer finalist Mary Kouyoumdjian, an artist whose music swells with the emotion of having an unsettled family in the Lebanese Civil War (all streaming proceeds from Witness are directed to support the Armenian and Lebanese communities). Together, they utilize the voices of those who lived through that horrific period, as well as aged folk song and field recordings. To that, Kouyoumdjian and her often minor chord–driven melodies and harmonies seem unafraid to use anything to get her pained point across to the listener.
At turns gorgeous, brutal, and awe-stricken, the achingly slow repetition that guides moments such as “Silent Cranes I: slave to your voice” and the calm call of its vocalist Armenak Shah Muradian turn on a dime to something inflamed and tentatively violent by mid-song. The pacing “Groung [Crane]” could itself be a child’s lullaby if not for the mournful manner in which Harrington’s violin hangs in mid-air like a deflating parade balloon. The unhurried brightness of the intro to “Bombs of Beirut II: The War” is made chillier and chillier by its clipped Greek chorus of witnesses reliving their horrors. As the 13-minute track moves forward, so, too, does its tempo, growing jagged, barbed, and dissonant until the literal explosions of its halfway point.
Much of Witness does this—rises to fall, to drift, to linger, to crush; its rhythms not so much an audible punctuation but an inference, a mood married to the foot-feel of its march, a mannered but not polite creep to some unknowing battleground. Despite how often its voices and Kronos’ strings pierce loudly through the icy smoke of Kouyoumdjian’s compositions, so much of the record is revealed in what isn’t there, the surprise spaces that fall silent after its orchestration rises and stings. I won’t pretend to know what the pains and pangs of battle are, or what continual torturous atrocities do to people. I will, though, hazard a guess that Kronos Quartet and Mary Kouyoumdjian’s elegant compositions for Witness are worthy, undulating documentation to whatever war may be.
