Monolith Cocktail Blog

A LONGFORM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA

Cut The Sky ‘Esz Kodesz’
(Aion Records) Released 1st December 2023

Cut from beneath scar-baring (loaded with suffering) skies, the new appellation chapter for the Alex Roth, Wacłew Zimpel and Hubert Zemler trio couldn’t have emerged at a more challenging time.

With anti-Semitism at an all-time high across Europe and North America in the wake of the barbaric terrorism of Hamas on October 7^th, and the ensuing destructive retaliation, obliteration of Gaza by Israel, division has been sown down political lines of grievance: you either stand with Palestine or Israel it seems, with no room for nuance, the complexities let alone balance. The sheer mindlessness and oblivious lack of decency by many is staggering; with opinions cast, placards held and slogans shouted by people without the faintest clue, knowledge of what they pontificate. You can quite rightly rile against or denounce both parties in this escalating conflict, but to only take one side is disingenuous at best, at worst, deplorable. Yes, the catalyst argument is trotted out every time, but if we want history lessons and context, we should go back not just 70-odd years but a thousand, two thousand.

Roth, Zimpel and Zemler couldn’t have foreseen this latest tragedy of course; and so this album has appeared in a hostile inferno. And then again, it is most timely, subject wise, dealing as it does with Roth’s Jewish geographical roots and ancestry. But as lesson in how Israel was formed and peopled, it is an abstracted tale of exodus and belonging too, informed as it is by the Jewish history of old Galicia. Only emancipated in 1867, when ruled under the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, that community which had given so much to this region of Eastern Europe, were victims of numerous pograms and even extermination – from the tumultuous fall-out of post WWI Ukraine to hostility under the Soviets, and then by the Nazi’s. A sizeable majority of that Jewish community would end up in Israel (anther major destination being neighbouring Poland, but further afield too, and on to America) fleeing persecution.

Drawing on that legacy, a personal odyssey of return if you will, the trio’s bandleader and guitarist, Roth, has found a troubling absence in a land of once awash with its vibrant Jewish culture. Informed by Roth’s artist-in-residence spell at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow (just one of the major hubs, cities that was once part of that old region that encompassed South Eastern Poland, Western Ukraine and a long part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Cut The Sky’s debut album quantifies a sense of desolation, and yet shared universal commonality.

Where once those thriving bastions stood, only the ghosts now remain; the imagery accumulation of left objects and the remnants, as displayed in that museum’s main exhibition, can’t help but evoke a deep sadness; commemorating as it does, 800 years of a Jewish presence in Western Galicia. The titles of each section of that main exhibit drive home that tragedy and loss: ‘Jewish Life In Ruins’, ‘Jewish Culture As It Once Was’, ‘The Holocaust Sites Of Massacre And Destruction’. They also make clear the act of remembrance, of never forgetting what went before: ‘How The Past Is Being Remembered’ and ‘People Making Memory Today’.

With his clarinetist and drumming/percussive foils, a feeling of trauma, but also belonging to a place and time, is abstracted from the psychogeography and atmospherics of that source material. And it all begins with a murder of crows; a flock scattered and disturbed in an atonal soundscape of Walter Smetek and Śirom influences, a touch of Mark Hollis and Bex Burch: Branches of post-jazz, post-rock and post-minimalism crossover, into the earthy world of the recognisable and yet unfamiliar.

The rest of the album, lyrical with its track titles, makes bracketed prompts, references to the famous cities of that realm; starting with Lublin, which, in this light of encapsulating hurt, was infamously home to one of the Polish Jewish ghettos during the Nazi’s eradication of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Known as the ‘gate to the East’, the largest city on the Vistula was also home to the iconic Maharam’s Synagogue; destroyed in 1655 by pogram rampaging Cossacks, but rebuilt and lasting the course of history until the Nazi’s symbolically blew it up. Many of its congregation, which numbered in the thousands, were rounded up and sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. Nothing is obviously implied, but ‘The Swans Will sing When The Jackdows Fall Silent’ conveys a plaintive vapour and certain dry blown airiness of near-nothingness, of absence – the clarinet almost sounding like a transported didgeridoo in the dust bowl of the outback, but also like the long, thinly-drawn out steam release of Anthony Braxton.

‘Warszawa’, with its legacy, importance and cultural cache, obviously carries a lot of historical weight. In this context, the mood is reflective and thoughtful, if still mysterious and weary.

The title-track, which is perhaps reflecting the Yiddish language of the region’s Jewish population, has a semblance of musicality against the dried breathless whines and winds of the woodwind. Zemler’s drums this time patter a tribal-like beat as Roth’s feedback and hovered notes actually sound like a guitar – it reminded me of Don Fiorino and 75 Dollar Bill.

This album of manifest feelings, and the empirical, ends on a hallowed, afflatus note of pastoral liturgy, in the city of Lviv. Once on the opposite side of the border in Poland, Lviv has instead become a target for Putin’s barbaric evil war of re-conquest. To the far West of Ukraine, which should shield it (little comfort I know) from the worst of the bombardments and shelling, this strategic gateway also has a strong, and because of that, bloody history of Jewish settlement. The trio offer both a living, breathing memorial and comfort that gives life to the classical reverential and bellowed organ music and choral song of that community; one that though harried, set-upon and violently attacked, left an indelible mark that can’t be easily erased. And for that, Cut The Sky has managed to draw on the essence to portray something tangible and moving; religious and yet esoteric.

The second of two debut projects for Roth this year – already impressing with the MultiTraction supergroup collective and their inaugural Reactor One album -, this trio has inadvertently arrived at a time of geopolitical violence across the Middle East. This only makes the project even more important: whatever the intentions. A healing process and reconnection to an ancestral homeland can’t help but now reverberate with the current crisis. Forced out, the Jewish Galician populations’ turmoil is made real with a highly experimental, emotional and yet mystical environmental soundtrack.

Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.