Aaron Novik: Secret of Secrets

Aaron Novik blends the readings of the Kabbalah into a nouveau, borderless set of musical inferences, combining horns, strings, electronics and disparate instrumentation with Jewish mysticism and man's destiny into a shadowy portraiture. Featuring ominous passages and weighty movements, the San Francisco-based leader integrates his electric clarinet amid a cavalcade of psycho-rock sorties and lean improvisational segments, embedded into an ultra-progressive program.

Here, Jewish traditional music is often low-key, but suitably presented in various forms and flavors. However, Novik and his large ensemble override the core elements with contemporary chamber movements, electro-acoustic metrics, and pulsating arrangements, featuring Carla Kihlstedt's scorching electric violin solos.

Eminent guitarist Fred Frith incorporates avant-rock treatments as Cornelius Boot's bizarre robot clarinet lines offer a portentous bottom-end. Within various theme-building escapades dispersed throughout these five movements that follow the Kabbalah, Novik and his cohorts impart guerilla tactics via alien-like treatments and moments that summon a day of reckoning mindset.

Not feeble by any stretch, Novik casts a soul-drenched series of abstractions into more conventional frameworks, where treks into an interminable abyss blossom into harrowing sound-shaping vamps. Yet, the band lightens the load a bit on the closing "Secrets of Formation (Bulgar)," dishing out a happy-go-lucky, cartoonish soundtrack moving along in linear fashion.

The album signals a potpourri of divergent perspectives, unanticipated surprises and gargantuan opuses. Novik summons imagery that teeters upon social disorder, coupled with the inherent religious aspects that correlate the basis for his heterogeneous tactics.

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