This song comes from a concert by Teater Slava, a Swedish choral/theater company I studied with my twenties. Slava performances aren’t theatrical experiences in any traditional sense, they don’t really have any plot or formal story structure. They’re a mash up of folk songs the company collects in their travels around the world. They learn and teach all the music by ear and don’t retain anything about what the words of them mean. The assembly of pieces is an intuitive one, and to me feels like a bit of long ago ritual plopped into a modern world.

This piece is just a shofar horn and single female voice pushing itself to the edge of its expressive capacity. It’s just on the edge of hard to listen to, deeply cathartic in a punk-y kind of way. It doesn’t end, really, just stops in the midst, leaving both the vocalist and the listener waiting for an answer from whoever’s on the other side of its cry.

Listen here.