Shiggajon - Sela (2015)

It’s hard to describeshiggajon Shiggajon. Okay, not really. Shiggajon is a Danish music collective that makes music you might hear prior to the Rapture happening. Or moments before aliens descend onto this planet. Or possibly what you hear in your head during a funeral at sea. It’s a volcanic sound. Overpowering, mighty, menacing, and kinetic. Sela, Shiggajon’s new album, seems to be the sound of bugs devouring the corpse of time, amplified to infinity. It feels like music created within a vast space of trees, brush, and menace. It’s two 18+ minute song cycles that carry you on a tribal, rural journey that neither kills you nor saves you. It merely whips you around for nearly 40 minutes of transcending madness.

So this is what Shiggajon has to say about Shiggajon: “A Danish modern free music collective and continuing collaboration revolving around the duo Nikolai Brix Vartenberg and Mikkel Reher-Langberg. Shiggajon is not freejazz.” Shiggajon is definitely not freejazz. What it is, to my ears, is music and nature colliding in an explosion of strings, woodwinds, percussion, and drone. The two songs collected on Sela feel like slow movements in nature. Something very much of the soil and sea. “Maeander”, on side one is slow moving yet forceful. It starts as intermingling violin strings and light, silvery percussion as the song slowly adds elements until it builds to a caustic conclusion. Much like it’s namesake(Maeander is the ancient name for the Menderes River of Western Turkey), this song flows and plods like a body of water down a gouge in the earth. “Sela” is the whole of side two and it keeps that post-apocalyptic folk sound going. Percussion touches gives the song a Middle Eastern flair, which makes sense given the word’s religious connections. Sela, in biblical terms, means rock. Mentioned by the prophets as “doomed to destruction”, you get that feeling as you listen. Within this track is where you hear what the folks at El Paraiso heard that made them want to put this album out. It resembles some of the spastic, spacey, and expansive vibes of Causa Sui’s Pewt’r Sessions albums, albeit grounded in more ancient waters. As a whole, “Sela” feels less tense and more spiritual and resonates with an inner light. Maybe not optimism, but a tempered stoicism.

Shiggajon’s Sela is an interesting and compelling record. It never explodes, nor does it fizzle either. It feels like a campfire within a dense forest. A distant light you see as you make your way slowly through dangerous foliage. No moon above to guide you, just the distant flickering of flames licking towards the black, night sky. Sela is both the sound of an Appalachian death march through mountains and rivers, and of the universe folding onto itself ever so gently.

Danish collective Shiggajon issue a disclaimer as regards their sound, and it goes like this: “Shiggajon is not freejazz.” Fair enough. The truth of what they “are,” at least on their newest offering, Sela — also their first to be issued through Causa Sui‘s label, El Paraiso Records — is both more complicated and less off-putting. Jazz is part of it, freedom is part of it, but there’s also psychedelic exploration, jamming, experimental rock, ambient texturing and a deep-rooted improvisational sensibility that, in large part, defines the two included tracks, “Mæander” and “Sela,” each of which boasts sprawl enough to consume a vinyl side. Another part of what Shiggajon “are,” however, is amorphous.

Based around the duo of saxophonist Nikolai Brix Vartenberg and Mikkel Reher-Langberg, who on Sela handles drums, percussion and clarinet, the band has a revolving-door contributorship as well as a massively prolific level of output, including studio and live records, one-off CD-Rs and so on. Being hard to define is part of the trip. For “Mæander” (18:14) and “Sela” (18:29), they’re joined by violinist and double-bassist Emil Rothenborg, drummer Martin Aagaard Jensen, drummer, percussionist ang guitarist Mikkel Elzer and vocalist and silver flutist Sarah Lorraine Hepburn, who also donates electronics and tingshaws, the latter of which sets a major tone of pastoralism in the developmental stages of “Mæander,” along with Rothenborg‘s violin and various jingling bells.

Far back percussion — congas, maybe — gives a somewhat ritualized feel, and Hepburn‘s sans-lyrics vocal textures come presaged by an uptick in those bells, so there’s a plan at work on “Mæander,” though far more satisfying is the process of letting Shiggajon, whoever, wherever, whenever, whatever they are, construct the flow of the track and be carried along its multifaceted currents. Natural vibing is pervasive and proceeds gloriously, without interruption, to spread out over side A’s 18-minute course, cymbals keeping rhythm not in straightforward rock progressions but in timed ceremonial march.