With these recordings, Djivan Gasparyan and Michael Brook have fashioned a unique musical hybrid.
The duduk is prominently featured, as one might expect, but a surprise is in store for those not yet appraised of Gasparyan's vocal capabilities; his singing is vibrant and assured, its timbral colours neatly dovetailing with the warm, slightly nasal tone of the duduk. Both instruments are displayed to best advantage against the varied arrangements drafted and performed by Brook, with help from the English engineer and multi-instrumentalist Richard Evans.
Real World : CDRW73 - Djivan Gasparyan is Armenia's greatest musician, his emotion-laden playing of the ancient duduk (an oboe-like instrument)is legendary and on "Black Rock", Michael Brook has added his beautiful shimmering guitar lines to this unique musical hybrid, making it one of the Real World label's most successful artist collaborations.
The revelation...is Gasparyans singing which he hasnt done on any of the solo albums Ive heard.
November 1998
Press review from: Folk Roots (UK)
...a near perfect meld of the ethnic and the technological...
October 1998
Press review from: Q Magazine (UK)
World Album of the Month...spacious, desolate and evocative.
October 1998
Press review from: Mojo (UK)
Brook surrounds the soul-wrenching melodies Gasparyan coaxes from his double-reed wind instrument with earthy textures...spiritual music taken to another dimension.
24 October 1998
Press review from: Billboard (USA)
...profound chemistry is at work...stately and haunting, its a perfect blend of the antique and the futurist.
6 September 1998
Press review from: Observer (UK)
World music release of the month...an intriguing hybrid of tranquil moods and dark passions.
5 September 1998
Press review from: The Times (UK)
..its that instruments [the duduks] mesmeric coo which forms the emotional core of Black Rock. As for Michael Brook...his job [is] locating a groove, teasing it out and surrounding it with a pre-natal sense of warmth. Sometimes his presence is barely discernible, but on the elegiac dub of Immigrants Song and Together Forever, theres a wide-eyed synergy at work which belies the 110 combined years of its practitioners. The beginning, one hopes, of a beautiful friendship.
1 September 1998
Press review from: Time Out (UK)
..Gasparyan and Brook are both passionate sentimentalists who find a lot of common ground in their desire to sculpt sensuous textures in their music...the effect is contagious, and there are many spine-tingling moments. Sentimentalist it may be, but it works like magic.
September 1998
Press review from: The Wire (UK)
...in Gasparyans expert hands, it [the duduk] possesses a deceptively malleable tone, eliding smoothly between notes to lend a heady, seductive sway to the eight pieces which comprise Black Rock. Brook, for his part, unerringly locates the inner rhythms of pieces like To The River and Take My Heart with hand percussion and repetitive guitar figures - no mean feat...The results are quite magical.
14 August 1998
Press review from: The Independant (UK)
Molokai
Sampradaya
