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During 1988's summer solstice, Swiss violinist Paul Giger was allowed to enter the crypt and upper church of the cathedral at Chartres, France to record one of the finest... well, I can't write enough superlatives about Chartres. But other people can:

"Henry Adams wrote half a book about it: `Chartres [cathedral] expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt - the struggle of his own littleness, to grasp the infinite.´ But you could listen to Chartres blindfolded and be impressed by the ancient/pagan power of Giger's raw bow scrapes, madly-fiddled chords, high uninflected long notes, and didgeridoo-like droning. He taps something deep, elemental, and emotional, beyond or beside the brainbusting computations." --City Paper, Baltimore

"Giger's music is undisciplined to the extent that it sounds more like improvisation than a written-out composition. In the range of its references it is unashamedly eclectic; the naive and the rhetorical rub shoulders; traditional, experimental and psychedelic happily cohabit; everything is embraced from organum to Penderecki, from folk-fiddling to the song of the humpbacked whale. Nor is a single trick of the violinist's craft missed. Harmonics, glissandos, multiple stops, devil's trills, fancy bowings, the noises of wood and horse-hair, all have a place in the design. This may sound unpromising, but in fact Giger's spectacular technical control of his instrument saves the day. In virtuosity he far outclasses many concert violinists, and his resourcefulness and assurance breathe vitality into the work. At best, in the concluding `Holy Center´ (much indebted to La Monte Young and Stockhausen's Stimmung), there is a marvelous sense of a man totally at one with his violin, voice and instrument simultaneously lost in contemplation of the marvels of natural harmonics." --J.M. Gramophone



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