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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Lucia Hwong (born in Hawaii but based in Los Angeles), who studied both Western classical music and Eastern classical music, is a virtuoso of several types of zithers and lutes, and arranges her compositions with synthesizers. The austere chamber compositions of House Of Sleeping Beauties for wind orchestra, violin, zither, electronics, and soprano voice constitute one of the boldest achievements of world music, to the point that they are no longer world music, but simply music.
The Tibet Suite represents her greatest compositional and stylistic effort. Hwong favors a convoluted development, an extremely rapid alternation of instruments, a perpetual motion of timbres, as if the score were constantly being called into question. In The Dream intertwines flute, saxophone, voice, violin, zither, and voice in a solemn overture. With Journey To Lhasa, a new form of lied takes shape, exceedingly sweet and slow: the voice, absorbed in long vowels, duets with flute and violin against a background of ethnic instruments and electronic "drones." The soprano, by contrast, commands the hymn of Everest At Sunrise from above, again using the technique of long wordless vowels, while the violin and flute must content themselves with accompanying her from a distance.
Percussion makes an appearance in the martial Sunset Over Sakya and the tempestuous Himalayan Twilight: in both cases it generates a thunderous chaos of rhythms over which the wind instruments launch their fanfares. The most elusive quality of Hwong's compositions is that the hierarchical relationships among the instruments are never clear. At every moment the orchestration is very clearly layered (the melody may be carried by the flute in the foreground, with soprano resonances in the middle ground and waves of synthesizer in the background), but in the next instant the roles of the instruments may change radically (the voice may move to the foreground, while flute and violin fiddle around behind it and a swarm of ethnic instruments emerges in the background). The same album also collects the Virgin Dances and the Dragon Dance, two simpler pieces that rely on the tumult of percussion and the feverish vibrations of the zither. On Secret Luminescence, she is joined by Celtic harpist Alan Stivell.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Goddess vol.1: Awakening (M32, 1998) is basically a collection of
high-tech collages in the form of multi-layered dance music:
the ethnic-funk-jazz shuffle of Lucid Dream (synthesizers, drum-machines, wordless wailing, natural sounds, exotic percussion, bass loops, Sylvain Leroux's Indian-esque saxophone),
the ghostly trance of Mystic Cat (fibrillating electronic rhythms, operatic vocals, samples of folk songs and natural sounds, lopping patterns of percussion),
the eerie ceremony of Spirit Guide (thick African texture, mesmerizing flute, shamanic voices),
etc.
The same format serves new-age spirituality (Astral Angel),
and the ambient disco (Celestial Beauty).
When Hwong dispenses with the electronic apparatus, as in Cosmic Warrior,
the percussions prevail.
The album closes with the angelic vision of Venus Kiss, first evoked by
a shakuhachi and then soaring in a spiral of female voices and strings.
Goddess vol.2: Celestial Realms (M32, 1998) abandons the exuberant
dance rhythms of the first volume and indulges instead in the languid, new-age
atmospheres of Angels and Beauty,
occasionally redeemed by the human voice (Dream)
or by a combination of natural sounds and acoustic instruments (Venus).
Half of the tracks are "remixes" (or different takes) of the first six tracks.
Goddess vol.3: Mystical Visions (M32, 1998) contains four lengthy
compositions, each dedicated to a different region of the world.
Again, the spiritual tone prevails, leading to over-extended tracks
that waste most of their potential in annoyingly static passages.
Instead of composing music, Hwong constructs relaxation exercises.
Each of the four tracks
(Galapagos, Tibet, Amazon, Hawaii)
has Hwong narrating/instructing (in a rather
unnerving manner) over sparsely-populated electronic (and sometimes vocal) soundscapes.
The second and third chapter of the trilogy are vastly inferior to
the first one.
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