Wickham-Smith, Simon - Love & Lamentation
SKU
POGUS21048
"Simon Wickham-Smith was born on the south coast of England in
February 1968 and graduated from King’s College, London in 1990 with a degree in EnglishLiterature. Whilst at university, he met Richard Youngs and from that meeting developed a friendship which has produced more recordings than he cares to remember. Not satisfied with making music, he has also been a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition, and is also a translator and scholar of Mongolian and Tibetan literature. The Sandokai ("The Harmony of Difference and Equality") is a prayer written
by the eighth century Japanese Zen teacher Sekito Kisen. The basis
for this piece was a tape given to Wickham-Smith by a nun of a recital at her monastery. He wanted to create of this sample a prayer without
borders, a follow-up to an earlier work, Ave Regina Caelorum (2000, released on Extreme Bukake, in which he used the Latin plainsong of a prayer to the Virgin Mary in much the same way. The organ sample at the end is from a piece by Erik Satie, whose spirituality was equally strange and eclectic. All the samples have been stretched and pitch-shifted beyond (immediate) recognition; to the ears they have melded into something that seems at once both ethereal and solid."