Stella Chiweshe - "Kasawha"

I spoke to the bell tower master at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Anglican diocese in Quebec City recently. In a few weeks, with the help of a team of expert bell ringers from the UK and the US, he will attempt the second full peal of his bell-ringing career. (Ringers will never promise a full peal, only an attempt.) If successful, the peal will last three hours; all of the eight bells, which were built in London in the 1830s, will be rung 5,030 times, one at a time, without repeating any sequence twice. With enthusiasm, the man described the peal's complexity of sound and execution, the ringers' "three mesmerizing hours of total concentration." While he seemed reluctant to speak about the musical element of the peal, preferring to treat ringing from the practical hobbyist's perspective, his portrayal of the process and its effect on listeners reminded me of the power of the particularly dense finger-picking part or, especially, the musical math of a well played mbira/kalimba, to coax a listener astray, into the maze of its patterns and permutations - like a stargazer lost in the night sky - looking ever closer, seeing ever less.

Laura Barrett - "Deception Island Optimists Club"

[Buy Chiweshe, Barrett]