Jeremiah Cymerman: Systema Munditotius, vol. 1

Musician, composer, producer, Jeremiah Cymerman may have created the soundtrack to our current circumstance. Not that his project Systema Munditotius, vol. 1 was conceived and produced after the discovery of the CoronaVirus in 2019, but that it may have prophesied this pandemic.

This project centers around a diagram psychiatrist Carl Jung created in 1916. It was a mandala representing the system of all the worlds. Where his prior recording Decay of An Angel (5019 Records, 2018) concerned the intersection of the acoustic (man) and the electro-acoustic (machine), Systema Munditotius, vol. 1 deals with the correspondence between man and the Universe. To put it in simpler terms, this is the soundtrack to a film being shot everyday through your own eyes.

Together with Yeah Yeah Yeahs' drummer Brian Chase, also a member of Cymerman's trio Pale Horse with Christopher Hoffman, the pair deliver the six movements heard as four clarinets and two percussionists, interlaced with electronics and delay to effect a chimerical sound. The suite is thoroughly composed and executed as formal twenty-first century music, albeit cast as ominous and forbidding. Cymerman sculpts with low-end bass frequencies and knife-edged overblown clarinets to craft differing weather patterns. His use of percussion mines a boom-boom pulse against the rattle-tick of a snare drum which incites butterflies to lengthen the tension. Sequenced together, the music simultaneously looks both inward and outward at the same time. This is deep dive music.