Computers don’t do synergy. They do beat perfect and they do all sorts of clever sonic processing, but they don’t do synergy. You can’t program synergy for it requires a sense of collaborative purpose that is, and always has been, analogue and it would be hard to find a more organic collaboration than Kamancello demonstrate on their album “Of Shadows”.
Kamancello - Shahriyar Jamshidi and Raphael Weinroth-Browne - are possessed of a rare fluency that infuses their musical adventures on kamanche and cello with the kind of precise, but never sterile, diction that can communicate the value of moments of reflection across the ether to your ears. This wordless exchange is easier to experience than to explain for, like all successful attempts to parallel emotions into a music form, Kamancello make it seem as if it were a purely natural occurrence rather than the result of years of study and practice.
Such is their combined eloquence that these two musicians can move your thoughts from the trivialities of life to a place where, for that short period of time at least, the simple beauty of their artistic endeavours becomes all that you can think of.
Sometimes you need to find a tonic for tired ears and, if you’re lucky, you find it. “Of Shadows” is such a tonic.
Available from Bandcamp.
Best song? The neo baroque “The Rider”.
The verdict? Musical maturity always pays dividends.