“On a day such as this,” David Thomas once sang, “insist on more than the truth.” “Day Such as This,” from Pere Ubu’s Song of the Bailing Man, is an elaborate studio concoction in celebration of hyperbole. Jeremiah Cymerman has never signaled any great appreciation for Pere Ubu, but that song nonetheless proposes a way to describe what he does on Decay of the Angel.
The album is the outcome of years of solo clarinet concerts, some in his native New York and some on tours around the Eastern US and Europe, in which he delved into the harsh discipline of solo improvisation. And yet the credits don’t even name the instrument, even though it’s likely the only horn on the record. Cymerman is also an audio engineer who has specialized in live recordings, podcast production and album post-production. While parts of this album sound quite like what he has played in concert, they don’t stop there. Hours of post-recording cutting, enhancement and reconstruction went into this music. So do you honor its formation by calling his method improvisation, or the screen time that shaped it by calling it composition? Third choice — call it hyperbolic clarinet.
Take the title track, a 22 minute-long behemoth that takes up one third of the CD’s running time. It begins with a single note, which sounds, decays and sounds again. Then ghostly resonances respond to that note, quiet and complex, like an accompanist searching for the right chord to support the soloist. As that exchange progresses, a bass presence rises up through the soles of your feet while elongated notes turn into even longer stretches of flutter tonguing. Then silence, followed by a slow-motion shift between isolated multiphonics, subliminal whistles and roughly filtered purrs. Fast-forward to the midpoint of the piece and there’s a passage where you follow tones into the interior of the clarinet, pads clicking over your head, and then step into a cavern where Eliane Radigue-like pitches execute subdued Doppler maneuvers around the circumference. “Decay of the Angel” acquaints you with a comprehensive catalog of clarinet potentialities, and then insists that that’s not enough.
Each of the shorter tracks is packed with event. “Spheres of Dissonance” also visits Radigue territory. But where the French composer might unpack some difference tones over a half hour or longer, Cymerman bombards them for six harrowing minutes with a variety of reed-based armaments. High shrieks, alien deflations, and a convincing approximation of a squeaky door hinge assail the minimalist content like a gang of malevolent musique concrète partisans determined to disrupt the concert. Rather than analyze the rest, let’s just stop here and acknowledge that any album that inspires such extravagantly loose and unlikely associations is better than drugs. Decay of the Angel declines to satisfy anyone who wants music to fit into established stylistic or methodological cubbyholes. This is music determined to be what it is that was made the way it needed to be made."

-Bill Meyer, Dusted

"If you've listened to the other albums by clarinetist Jeremiah Cymerman, you know that he has an approach that is uniquely his own, a kind of passionate and relentless search for meaningful sound, or sound creation in the broadest sense. His instrument, often electronically supported, is only a tool to achieve this, and paradoxically, by doing so, he also changes the possibilities of his instrument. But the sound remains the first objective, and in line with his previous albums, one that is deeply dark and pessimistic in tone, as if made to accompany the ultimate annihilation of life.

It's his first solo album in many years, and one to cherish. Describing the music is almost impossible, but it is obstinate, headstrong, very linear in its flow, with minor shifts in color and multiphonics creating a strange palette of moving darkness out of which eery solo sounds full of despair and desolation emerge.

Like his previous albums - "Sheen", "Pale Horse", "Badlands", "Sky Burial", "World of Objects" - Cymerman integrates musical subgenres, from modern classical over ambient, improvisation, metal to noise, to create his own unique and coherent vision, purifying his approach over the years, polishing it, refining it, not in the sense of cleaning it up, but rather to make it more impactful, precise, more touching, more gripping.

The inspiration for the album's pieces come from literature with a major "L". The title of the album refers to the novel by Japanese author Yukio Mishima, and the last but one track "The Body Becomes Fetid" refers to one of the characteristics of a decaying angel. The second track, "With ten thousand shields and spears", refers to a poem by William Blake, printed here below. "The Canto of Ulysses" refers to a chapter in the book "If This Is A Man", by Italian holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi, who also committed suicide in the late 80s. In the chapter, the main character tries to remember a passage from Dante's Inferno.

Amazinly enough, the last track "Out of Many Waters" (possibly referring to the novel by Jacqueline Greene about a 12-year old girl who escapes slavery in Brasil to be among the first jewish settlers in America), is for pure acoustic solo clarinet, resonating in empty space, with long circular breathing passages, sounding different, offering a glimmer of hope coming out of the darkness. A beautiful piece to end an album with an incredibly strong artistic vision."

-Stef Gijssels, the Free Jazz Collective