On various tracks, listeners hear invented folk songs played on unfamiliar instruments, cyclical vocal chants, minimalist mallet pieces, and occasional environmental sounds. Fitting into the fictional anthropological framework, the sounds on the original cassette were presented as Lomax-style gleanings from The Valley, as the region is called throughout the book. To fully actualize the sonic world that courses through the text, Le Guin collaborated with Todd Barton, a polymath composer and musician whose remarkably diverse career includes a four-decade stint as resident composer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a deep expertise with a variety of modular synthesizer systems. Music and singing are interwoven throughout Kesh culture as important elements of ritual ceremony, seasonal celebration, and general playful expression. As with the four other excellent reissues in their catalog-which occupy a strange space between homebrewed ambient music, outsider electronic composition, and/or Fourth-World aesthetics- Music and Poetry of the Kesh resists easy categorization. Not long after Le Guin’s death in late January of this year, the stellar Freedom to Spend label released as an LP the material from the original cassette.
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