Stemming from a desire to re-work already-existent music from anonymous sources, Tomahawk’s recent album, Anonymous, is their own interpretation of 19th Century Native American music. According to Tomahawk’s guitar and bass-player Duane Denison, “We played on a number of reservations and I was disappointed when I saw Native American bands live. I was always surprised by how normal they sounded.”
So Denison began filtering through records in the public domain and found transcriptions of Native American music. The music was collected by a woman named Natalie Curtis whose husband had connections to Theodore Roosevelt, who, according Denison, was “the first U.S. president to actually care about ‘Indians,’ as they called them back then.” Curtis was given a grant to travel the land in effort to collect this music.
And now experimental music lovers (and Tomahawk fans) can hear a modern version of an historical sound. The complex rhythms and vocal patterns captured on Anonymous take time to learn and recognize, yet the mood of each song strings together the components in varying degrees of crescendo and de-crescendo. After a few listens, I found myself tapping my fingers along to the fast rhythms, then humming the sporadic notes to myself throughout the day. There is something exciting about the pulse of the music that drives me along with it. “It’s quite enjoyable [playing this music]. The rhythmic patterns are not your typical western patterns that you hear. That’s what we like about them, that they sound rather foreign,” explains Denison.
As was the intent of the music (at least one of the supposed intentions), the songs tell a story, and Tomahawk has captured the stories in the creation of a mood that represents what we might imagine to be the essence of each corresponding ritual. Antelope Ceremony, for example, has a pleasant consistency that builds into an eventual explosion of joyful sound. War Song has a very foreboding feel to it.
Though Tomahawk has not hunted large game or participated in traditional Native American ceremonies per se, the notions that are at the heart of the songs, of human interaction with life, with nature, and with each other, (whether in the form of peace or conflict) are intrinsic, and what isn’t conditioned out of us can be tapped into and expressed. Tomahawk has expressed these human elements well by following the original notation authentically while adding their own electronic pulse.
The songs are layered with the sounds of traditional instruments, most of which were played by the musicians themselves during recording. “All of the mouth operated and percussive instruments were organic,” says Denison. To the virgin ear, the sounds blend so naturally as to almost go unnoticed. But after a couple listens I started to pick up on the various Earth elements represented by such instruments as wind chimes, rattles, rain sticks, didgeridoos, and jew harps. The focus of the human voice is more instrumental than lyrical, and Mike Patton’s prolific vocal talents lend themselves well to the style; while his individualism on this album is subtle due to his blending with the musical source, his presence is at times very much apparent (like at the end of Cradle Song).
As a musician in general and a Tomahawk fan in specific, I am pleasantly surprised by Anonymous in its concept, its style, and its overall sound. And I was eager to know if we might have a chance to experience the music live. But it seems we must await an answer. “There is a chance of some shows but nothing solid yet,” says Denison. “It would be a lot of work to recreate that album. We haven’t gotten that far. But we did what we wanted to do and it worked out.”
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