Taking the name of a collection of William Blake, Aga Ujma's Songs Of Innocence and Experience sees the musician rotating contrasting themes in the palm of her hand, in a contemplative circular motion. Accommodating with her sound a tense balance of tubular stresses tugged, in a mixture of reluctance and indulgence, from the crescent-shaped sasando while tiptoeing on the spine of a structurally ambiguous trestle etched with a guileless coo, she baits the listener into a dance of inverted fantasies. The softness of her voice and the nervous, almost nieve, certainty of the instrumental arrangements suggest the virtue of unsullied childhood, while the apparent distemperment and dense folds of these features reveal something far more potent. These strange, charm-like songs with their serpentine, smoke-signal-esque shape, diplomatically torture a kind of nuance out of notions of romantic vitality by encircling the concept in a provocative peristyle of disembodied resonances and mischievous ambiance. It is an architecture that suggests that the fall from grace into adulthood is actually a species of ascendance. A right of paramountcy. Through this short pamphlet of four aural theses, Aga guides the listener to a higher understanding of their inheritance within the wheel of human experience. Half hidden networks of belted, pliant melodies that provide lift through encounters with expanding ribs of marrow and that greet one's feet like the rungs of a step ladder leading to some distant portal of light. It is the manifestation of the fantasy of escaping the low expectations and confinements of youth. A dream of forever outstripping the regressive pull of simpleton poets and retrograde visions of purification through pre-pubescent dissociative states. In other words, Songs Of Innocence and Experience are songs for adults. Persons who mean to seize the reigns of lives they were meant to accede to.
