Johanna Glaza
Review: Johanna Glaza – Albion
February 24, 2019 Jason Whittaker
Superlatives are the bane of reviews. In recent months, however, I have found myself throwing superlatives around with abandon when describing a number of artists – usually women – who have demonstrated a profound relationship to the words and art of William Blake, whether it is Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead, Harriet Stubbs' astonishing performance on Heaven & Hell: The Doors of Perception or, now, Johanna Glaza's EP, Albion. The four pieces included on this release, available via streaming or as a cassette, demonstrate a remarkable talent which refuses to be easily described and which has made me listen to Blake's words as though I have heard them for the first time.
Glaza, born in Lithuania and resident now in London, is an independent artist who records music that she describes as "baroque folk songs with an avant-garde twist". Her previous releases, available at Bandcamp, include Wind Sculptures (2017), Paper Widow (2014) and Silence is Kind (2013), all of which have attracted considerable praise with comparisons to Kate Bush and Tori Amos but, as more percipient critics have observed, her experimental music only bears at most a passing resemblance to those artists. On this new EP, the track "Isabella" is perhaps the one that would work best as a single for wider consumption, offering as it does something approaching a more conventional lyrical verse-chorus-verse structure and musical signatures that generally balance each other – although even then the shift in tone in the middle is nothing short of astonishing. Indeed, even this, the nearest you will find to normality on Albion, reminded me at times of early Genesis when Peter Gabriel flirted on the edges of acceptable easy listening.
By contrast, the preceding "The Future Was Not the Animal I Saw" is much closer to a Steve Reich composition or the post-tonal serialism of Henri Pousseur. The fact that I am searching for analogies in classical rather than popular music demonstrates just how idiosyncratic this wonderful piece is, while the final track, "Broken Ray", is a heart-wrenching lamentation in which the ambient keyboards perfectly suit the intensely beautiful lyrics:
Like a broken ray of sun
Upon my chest, upon my chest
Lies your path
You walk away
The wound in the sky
Never heals, never heals
And where your heart used to be
Lies a stone
Beautiful as the entire EP is, however, the reason for reviewing it here is because of the titular track: drawing upon lines from Blake's Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, it has correctly been described as "the work of genius" by Paul Scott-Bates: when first listening to this, many will disagree, but each time I hear this track I can only agree with Scott Bates. Of course, I am an unusually pertinent target listener for such a track, but I am increasingly astonished by the dynamic range and dramatic qualities of Glaza's voice. In addition, the deceptively simple piano accompaniment, frequently pivoting around a series of notes and percussive accompaniment, is perfect for the metrical complexity of Blake's words, the first lines of which are reproduced below from plate 43 of Jerusalem:
We heard the voice of slumberous Albion, and thus he spake,
Idolatrous to his own Shadow words of eternity uttering:
O I am nothing when I enter into judgment with thee!
If thou withhold thine hand; I perish like a fallen leaf:
O I am nothing: and to nothing must return again:
If thou withdraw thy breath. Behold I am oblivion.
I can barely begin to explain just how electrifying these and the following lines are when sung by Glaza, maintaining a beautiful, angelic modulation for lines that could easily become atonal. It is simply stunning, a full embodiment of the human voice divine that sounds utterly unfamiliar, even alien at the same time. While remaining entirely original, it also reminds me of a similar experiment by Marc Almond and John Harle, The Tyburn Tree (Dark London) from 2014 which also took lines from Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion to create a disturbing, haunting composition. I have long been a fan of Almond, but I'm afraid in this particular instance even that bold work has been surpassed by Glaza who has produced an astonishing piece of work: Jerusalem does indeed have a voice, and her name is Johanna Glaza.
Albion (2018) by Johanna Glaza is self-released and is available from johannaglaza.bandcamp.com.
Reviews ambient folk, Johanna Glaza, music