El Hechizo de Babilonia

Spanish songwriter, musicologist, and multi-instrumentalist Luis Delgado, or "Thin Luis" as he is referred to in Madrid, has recorded a project so ambitious in both research and scope it's a miracle it was completed at all. Delgado has collected the poetry of six al-Andalus women from the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries and set it to music. This period in history saw an unprecedented expansion of Almora-vide and Almohad cultures from the Sahara where they originated to Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Maghrib, and the Iberian Peninsula to the mouth of the Ebo River. Seville and Marrakesh often alternated as their capitals. Delgado has taken the words of these women in order to give them back to them across the bridge of time. To wring from these deeply autobiographical and often fantastical accounts of life, love, and longing, their reality which so informs the world of both Arab and Spanish societies today, Delgado composed the beginning and ending pieces of this suite; his virtuoso collaborators, Hossam Ramzy, Jaime Munoz, and Javier Bergia, accompany him throughout. In between some of the poetesses' works he has included traditional music from the period, interpreted in his signature style. He has also employed vocalists Mariem Hassan, Herminia Hugenel, and Maria del Mar Bonet to sing, alternately the lyric poetry of these immortal poetesses. The women who wrote these pieces were from different classes, social and economic situations. Some were rich intellectuals, some were doctors, some were medicine women, some were blood-letters and paid mourners. Therefore, the range of these poems is wider, it would seem, than the world that contains them. In a sense it is, as traditional Arab musicians collide with contemporary Spanish nuances over medieval writings full of love, lust, pride, loss, and magic. The recording has the effect of an opiate it is so dreamy, so full of sights, smells, and velvety dark sensual pleasures. One can almost smell the perfumes and feel the caress of these women as they reach across the centuries to make their voices heard. Delgado offers a long and informative essay at the back of the booklet in Spanish and in English. This music is "exotic" in the sense that it is out of this world, out of space and time, and no longer contained by their continuum of parallel lines that intersect only occasionally. This is music that has an identity so pronounced, so full of its own sense of history and movement it cannot be fathomed even in this form. Luis Delgado has shown once again that to enter into the past with respect and wide-open eyes is to enter into a pact of mystery and myth from which one cannot emerge without the marks of its silence engraved upon one's skin.