Eclipse

MICROTONAL MARCH: 2/8

Only 2 albums in, and I’m absolutely loving the discovery of these microtonal string instruments – last weeks review featured the kora, and ‘Eclipse’ today features the oud, a short-necked 11-string instrument similar to the lute. The oud is a coursed instrument, meaning that one string or two or more adjacent strings are grouped closely together and typically played as a single string. This means that with some careful and specific tuning, you can play microtones and get some real funky and jarring dissonance.

‘Eclipse’ comes from Nubian artist Hamza El Din in 1978 and is an empirically non-Western sound. The album is extremely intimate and bare bones, only consisting of El Din’s vocals and clapping, the rapid fire and hypnotic sounds of the oud, and a hand drum called a tar. Despite being only 5 songs, the run time on ‘Eclipse’ gets to 44 minutes with the help of multiple 10+ minute songs, the longest of which being “Your Love Is Ever Young” at 18 minutes. The way that El Din’s voice bobs up and down over the oud feels as if it could lull you into a trance, like a psychedelic trip into the middle of the desert.

It’s a mesmerizing journey, but one that begins to feel too repetitive over time in order to fully hold my attention. There’s only so much that’s being done to differentiate each moment and it begins to blend into itself to where nothing stands out more than the rest. Perhaps that’s the intent or the style, but still, it ends up feeling more like a novel test of patience within an immersive African setting.