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Editorial Reviews

I Ching, the third album from Brazil's avante-garde group Uakti, consists largely of music written for the Grupo Corpo Brazilian Dance Theater by Uakti's leader, Marco Antonio Guimaraes. This gives the album a concept and a coherence sorely lacking from I Ching's predecessor, Mapa. The gimmick on I Ching is that the rhythm of the first eight pieces is based on the trigrams of the ancient Eastern method of divination, interpreted as if they were a kind of notation. This lets Uakti cut loose with a variety of potent pieces in a number of styles. For example, the track based on the trigram "earth" sounds vaguely like Bach played on the xylophone, while the track "water" sounds like psychedelic background music. The track for "mountain" starts off like a sad little tune for xylophone, until a soaring wind instrument that at first resembles a fiddle enters and elevates the proceedings to a more sublime level.

Normally, the trigrams are paired to form hexagrams, of which there are 64 possible. "The Hexagrams" takes us through the entire set, again treating them as some sort of esoteric rhythmic notation, tapping them out on the tuned drums to the accompaniment of the usual odd collection of instruments, including a wind that is mellifluous, yet simultaneously kazoo-like. At 18 minutes, "The Hexagrams" is in danger of becoming shapeless, but its conceptual link to the preceding pieces more or less saves it from that fate. The album's last two tracks, "Altinak" and "The Turning Point," were not composed by the group's leader but by its woodwind player, Artur Andres de Ribeiro. These pieces have a jazzier, less frenetic, less layered ambience than Guimaraes' work. Instead of sounding like Bach meets Glass, they sound somewhat like Claude Bolling on xylophone. At the end of an intense and sonically busy album, they come as a relief and a pleasure. Kurt Keefner, All Music Guide

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