Zeena Parkins, Cecilia Lopez - Red Shifts (Relative Pitch Records, 2025)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

Don’t know you, but for us harp always meant Her Majesty Alice Coltrane first, then Dorothy Ashby and basically the topic was done. The Forum as well doesn’t push you to drill any further. Ah, yes, we saw a couple of years ago Shabaka playing with no less than two harps (!) and by mere chance our ears caught fragments of the likes of Brandee Younger and Alina Bzhezhinska. Anyway, in all the examples as above, harp sounded like harp. 

Q: “How the hell should a harp sound like if not like a harp?”

A: “More than legitimate to be asked, we try to explain.” 

Let’s put it this way: we simply filed that beautiful sound under a sort of time-related directory (The Past not The Present): strictly speaking for Alice, while Shabaka’s last incarnation (with shakuhachi and similar stuff) shaped a kind of spiritual jazz deeply influenced by Lady Coltrane. And by her harp(s). Then one day, joining the dots to track down Mette Rasmussen’s works (the most beautiful sport ever invented, second to skiing only), we bumped into Glass Triangle, a trio where the divine danish turbo-sax player is accompanied by Ryan Sawyer on percussion and Zeena Parkins on, oh christ, electric harp. From that moment on, harp entered, in its own right, the scope of our music (and the one of our credit card as well…). Zeena is most definitely a hell of a top notch artist, as her official bio notes clearly show. 

“New York based electro-acoustic composer/improviser, she’s a pioneer of contemporary harp practices. Using expanded techniques, object preparations and electronic processing she has redefined the instrument’s capacities. Concurrently, Parkins self-designed a series of electric instruments. She leans into the harp’s physical limitations pushing its boundaries and impossibilities. In her compositions, she utilizes collections, recombination, historic proximities, geography, tactility, spatial configurations and movement. Sonic presence and personality is revealed in explorations of subtle frequency shifts, feedback, over and under tones, melodic fragments, timbral and gestural intervals, perception and residues.” 

Her compositions have been commissioned by the Whitney Museum and the Tate Modern, as well as by choreographers like Merce Cunningham and Jennifer Lacey, her music soundtracked films of Daria Martin, Cynthia Madansky, Abigail Child, Mandy MacIntosh and Isabella Rossellini. Over a 30-year career Zeena has worked with an unlikely range of collaborators: Bjork, Yoko Ono, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Butch Morris, Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Nels Cline, Elliot Sharp, Nate Wooley, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, Kim Gordon, Matmos, Chris Corsano, Anthony Braxton, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey and many others. One of a kind, we told you. 

This time around, Zeena is teaming up with Cecilia Lopez. composer. musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, currently based in New York. She works across the media of performance, sound, installation and the creation of sound devices and systems. Her work has been performed in several museums and galleries and her collaborators include Carmen Baliero, Aki Onda, Brandon Lopez, John Driscoll, Carrie Schneider and Lars Laumann among others. On “Red Shifts”, the first collaboration between them, out for Relative Pitch Records (one of the brightest stars among record companies’ galaxies) Cecilia is taking care of electronics, Red (a handwoven electronic instrument made from speaker wire) and synthesizers, while Zeena adds electric harp, acoustic harp and e-bow piano (an electronic device normally used for guitars that, creating a magnetic field, let the strings vibrate in a continuous motion) for an outcome of 8 pieces that drives the listener through a sonic labyrinth where traces of Ikue Mori or Eiko Ishibashi seem to show the exit: fake indications of course, there is no way to solve this free-electro Rubik's Cube but why the hell should we?