Cultural Crossroads: The Ancient Hand Project By Luis Rumbaut

As world music continues to develop, its composers strike out in specialized directions. Jim Roberts appropriately calls the sound of his Ancient Hand project "alternative world beat music." Often composed around a driving beat with techno/disco echoes , the tracks on this CD combine African and Caribbean sounds with alternative rock and electronic effects.

This is not folk music, nor, in the main, does it convey a cultural context. Rather, it's sound-centered music, focused on the interplay of rhythms and textures, music abstracted from its social context. Roberts' notes on the different tracks provide some background, but even these reflect a certain distance from the sources. The notes on Yemaya, for example, describe the African goddess as "synchronized with the Virgin Mary" in Cuban tradition. But the reference is really to syncretism, not synchronicity, and Yemayá is associated with a particular manifestation of the Virgin; other manifestations are associated with different goddesses.

The project is wide-ranging: here, Yoruba rhythms alternate with a Haitian chant and the industrial sound of plastic-bucket percussion. The themes range from the supernatural to human relationships, King Arthur and the Holy Grail, the destruction of rivers, the death of Princess Diana, and a Ku Klux Klan cross burning in the South. At the core of the project is a grouping of present and past rock musicians and sound engineers, with modern electronics at their disposal. It's not surprising, therefore, that the result is more about pure sound than about cultural expressions. The recording is driven by a musician's fascination with a variety of percussive effects, unrestrained by prior categorizations of which-things-belong-where.

Roberts himself makes this clear. About the title tune, Tranze is the Danze, he says "it was the groove that grabbed me initially." Wait for Me, an "experimental alternative cut," uses "a drum machine to drive the rhythm." Floating "uses wacky loops and sounds." In Avalon "surreal effect[s] create a mysterious mood," and so on. The instruments and arrangements generate a "feel," as in Iposophia, a lovely instrumental that makes use of water rhythms, turtle shells, balaphon, kalimba, talking drum, and chanting, in a West African 6/8 signature.

Plenty of instruments populate this world fusion recording. Besides the ones mentioned above, there are fiddle, effected guitar and vocals, banjo-uke, strum stick, clawhammer-style banjo, tin cans and toy instruments.

African and Cuban musicians join their alternative-rock counterparts here, in an expression of concepts that include "alternative sonorities, minimalism, rhythmic focus and detailed attention to sonics." Ancient Hand is not just about North/South, East/West encounters; it's also about sounds, and about the engineering and recording techniques that can become an extension of the musician's craft and part of the instrumentation itself.