The Desert Fathers: Coptic Icons

The Desert Fathers are:

Jeff Kaiser: Quartertone Trumpet, Laptop
Gregory Taylor: Laptop

1. Visions (Saint Anthony) 31:14
2. The White Monastery (Saint Shenouda) 26:02

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Recorded direct-to-disc 4.27 and 4.28.07 at the Boise Experimental Music Festival
CD art, mix and mastering by Jeff Kaiser
© 2007, Gregory Taylor, BMI and Jeff Kaiser Music, ASCAP
For more information:
www.pfMENTUM.com • PFMCD050

The Desert fathers—a collection of ascetics, monks, and hermits—fled the persecutions and chaos of the Roman Empire in the third century AD and settled in the deserts of Egypt, seeking safety and solace in loose-knit refugee communities at the margins of civilization. When the persecutions stopped, they remained-drawn as individuals by the solitude, privation, and self-discipline borne of desert life.

Born the son of wealthy landowners, orphaned, and later disciple of a local ascetic, St. Anthony the Great is noteworthy as the first to actually pursue an isolated (anchoritic) life in the desert itself. His biographies describe in vivid detail the afflictions and visions of his isolation—torments from which he emerged enlightened, serene, and healthy. After this, he moved further into the wilderness even as his fame grew, founding his own monastery where he dedicated himself and his disciples to prayer and the discipline of manual labor.

Shenouda the Archimandrite first visited the White Monastery (so named for the color of limestone of its outer walls) located near the Upper Egyptian city of Souhag as a boy. He remained there as a result of a vision granted to the monastery’s abbot, and eventually served as its abbot during its heyday as a thriving ascetic community.

Anthony and Shenouda were both canonized after their deaths as saints in the Coptic Orthodox Church. As monks, they combined their own individualized practices with regimens attuned to their lives in a desert environment and introduced elements of shared communal practice (the sharing of meals and liturgical practice) into their communities that laid the foundations for what we now think of as Christian monasticism.

THE DESERT FATHERS [JEFF KAISER/GREGORY TAYLOR] - Coptic Icons (pfMentum 050; USA) The Desert Fathers are/is Gregory Taylor on laptop and Jeff Kaiser on quartetone trumpet & laptop. The Desert fathers were a tribe of monks and hermits that fled the persecutions and chaos of the Roman Empire and settled in the deserts of Egypt. It may seem odd that two present-day improvisers would be inspired by two members of this clan, St. Anthony and Shenouda, but there is a parallel here of those who seek solitude, privation and self-discipline. It takes a certain focus and self-determination to come up with music that is from a different pond or planet than most popular music forms. There is a great deal of constantly shifting textures and manipulated trumpet sounds that evolve throughout this fascinating work. It is as if we were dropped in an alien world and the only thing that made regular sense was occasional recognizable sounds of a trumpet. Whispered and strangled vocal samples are well utilized and add an air of mystery shimmering, kaleidoscopic electronic sounds. When you least expect it, Jeff inserts a few jazz licks and brings us back down to the planet earth. Most of the time we are floating in a haze of warm yet cosmic electronic soundscapes.

- BLG, DowntownMusicGallery.com