DUSTED MAGAZINE

Dusted Reviews

Perlonex and Charlemagne Palestine - It Ain’t Necessarily So

today features
reviews charts
labels writers
info donate

Search by Artist



Sign up here to receive weekly updates from Dusted


email address

Recent Reviews

Dusted Reviews


Artist: Perlonex and Charlemagne Palestine

Album: It Ain’t Necessarily So

Label: Zarek

Review date: Mar. 5, 2010


It seems that composer/pianist/ performance artist Charlemagne Palestine has found, in the electro-acoustic trio Perlonex, some ideal collaborators. This two-CD set, recorded during a performance in Vienna in 2006, offers an engaging and engulfing listening experience, vibrating with both the crystalline grace and the compulsive discord that have long been a hallmark of Palestine’s sound world.

The sounds begin with long tones, likely from Ignaz Schick’s sine wave generators and devices: additive drones building up overtones, creating the sound-as-physical presence sensation familiar from Palestine’s organ compositions. Palestine, first with distant cantorial vocals, then with gently arpeggiated and, eventually, massively strummed grand piano patterns, finds space within this ever-changing flow. All the while the pulse and chatter and texture provided by Jorg Maria Zeger’s guitars and stomp boxes and Burkhard Beins’ percussion and electronics add surprise. It’s a long unfolding, a slow and heavy flow of sound—sometimes harrowing, always hypnotic—as it variously drones, pulses, resonates; whispers, roars, thunders.

The performances were recorded at a club called Porgy and Bess. That and a chance encounter Palestine had with a distant relative of the Gershwin family account in part, apparently, for the work’s title, and for the jazz-like sections wherein Palestine sings and chants the eight-syllable melodic/lyrical motif from the Gershwins’s song, ”It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Palestine turns the phrase over and over in theme-and-variations, obsessively, shamanically, like a new thing tenor player, or perhaps like Bob Dorough morphing into Kurt Schwitters as a Gyuto monk. All the while the power of Perlonex’s sonic presence flows in and around both Charlemagne’s singing and his sometimes- fluttering, sometimes-pounding piano. The effect is seismic and celestial all at once.

Another thing—and not a small thing, maybe—that struck this reviewer upon repeated listening was the way Palestine and Perlonex have come close here, at times, to that elusive Cage-ean ideal: the power that rises from allowing sounds to adhere and yet still be sounds in and of themselves.

By Kevin Macneil Brown

Read More

View all articles by Kevin Macneil Brown

Find out more about Zarek

©2002-2011 Dusted Magazine. All Rights Reserved.