Max ZT / Dan Whitehouse Shizuka しずか Silk Mill Sessions

Track 3 from the album 'Ten Steps' - a collaboration between Black Country singer-songwriter, composer and spoken word artist Dan Whitehouse and Brooklyn's celebrated hammered dulcimer player Max ZT (of House of Waters). Album: https://danwhitehouse.bandcamp.com/al... Dan: Shizuka means quiet in Japanese (it can also be a name), it’s about the gentle, soft glow of the low hanging sun here, and how this matches the restrained, polite culture of their everyday exchanges and behaviour.   Due to an ear injury I was landlocked in Japan for 18 months and found myself on a journey into Japanese culture. Out walking at Tokyo Bay I encountered a group of people that would congregate at sunrise, face the sun and sing to it as it rose, no words but a distinctive sounding scale – I was on a zoom call to Max at the time who immediately identified this as the Insen scale    Max: It’s a raga called Shivrangani, the indian form of the Japanese scaled Insen – Insen is what they were singing. The Insen scale has this dark tri tone – an interval that used to be called the devil’s chord they used to execute people for composing with this chord! It's the note in between a perfect 4th and perfect 5th so even though it has this unease it still has this hope filled suspension. I think we bonded over the ‘tense but hopeful suspension’ feelings you get from ‘The Devil’s Chord’.