ARIEL KALMA - An Evolutionary Music: Original Recordings 1972-1979

"Ariel Kalma's boundary-blurring electronic music is heard here in radiant detail across a selection of work spanning his early free-jazz and spoken-word trips to his infinite modular synthesizer and analogue rhythm-machine meditations. Kalma's story is one of world travel, musical discovery and ego abandonment. Yet for an artist who often discarded public recognition in favor of the ascetic truths in musicmaking, An Evolutionary Music offers the imprint of an outright auteur.

Born in France, but rarely in one place for long, Kalma's 1970s migrations took flight through the decade's furthest spaces of musical and spiritual invention. As a hired horn for well-known French groups, the young musician toured as far as India in 1972, a place where Kalma found an antidote to rock 'n' roll's glitz and glamour in sacred music traditions. Kalma would later return to India and learn circular breathing techniques enabling him to sustain notes without pause against tape-looping harmonies configured through his homemade effects units.

Those effects evolved from Kalma's loyalty to a beloved dual ReVox setup—two tape machines 'chained' together to form a primitive delay unit. Over looped saxophone melodies, Kalma would mix in all shades of polyphonic color, synthesizing fragments of poetry with ambient space or setting modal flute melodies to rippling drum machine patterns and starlit field recordings. The results collapse distinctions between “electro-acoustic”, “biomusicology” and “ambient” categorization." - RVNG Intl.