Concerts | Klankhaven

A millennia-old instrument brought back at the intersection of contemporary, traditional, and experimental music.

Ondanaconda is a jaw harp ensemble based in Geneva, bringing together Laurent Bruttin, John Menoud, Daniel Zea, and Antoine Läng around an experimental electroacoustic approach to this family of instruments - the lamellophones - blending organic polyphony and raw analog synthesis.

The quartet views the jaw harp as a site for exploration, particularly from the angles of electronic music and electroacoustic experimentation. Through a four-handed writing process, the group focuses on repetition, sound distortions caused by exhaustion, almost independent acoustic phenomena, collective play and amplification. The intertwining of their four voices produces a fluid music which makes the body vibrate in an unfamiliar, yet surprisingly pleasant way and tricks the mind through its mesmerizing frequencies, just as a master magician would do.

***

Laurent Bruttin on the genesis of Ondanaconda:

'Before we formed this quartet, three of us were actually a noise trio. I was so sick of hauling all of our equipment around, that one day I proposed to use the lightest instrument possible, being, the jaw harp. What started as a joke, really, gradually evolved into an actual project which focuses on the performance practice of that ancient instrument.'

***

The jaw harp (also known as 'mouth harp', 'jew's harp' or 'juice harp') is one of the oldest instruments of the world. An archeological find in 2018 in Shaanxi, China, where about 20 pieces of this instrument were discovered, dating back about 4000 years ago, substantiates its ancient history. It carries a similar, almost prehistoric weight such as the musical instrument families of the aerophones - wind-based instruments - and lithophones, which incorporates rocks and stones to produce sound.

Its origins are assumed to be in Siberia, Russia, from around the Altai Mountains, but various types of mouth harps have been found literally all over the world, from the island group of Papua New Guinea, Japan, a great part of the Eurasian continent to the Appalachians, or what is nowadays called the United States. Or, as beautifully stated by the avant-garde/folk duo Michaela Antalová & Adrian Myhr: 'Historically, folk instruments have traveled across faraway lands without regard to borders, just like the migratory paths and dispersions of birds demonstrate the unnaturalness of human borders.'

Unseemingly so, despite the actual size of the instrument, it does require a specific and demanding body posture, physical stamina and mental strength. The performer must be able to sustain a constant flow of air and steady tongue movement, limiting the melodic material to the inherent range of the instrument, thus establishing a type of ancestral trance, which eventually paved the way for contemporary genres such minimalist classical, electronic dance music and avant-garde.

As a listener, there's no other way but to surrender and to tap into one's primal energy upon being resonated by the deep and repetitive frequencies of the jaw's harp.