Two of Swords out July 15th 2022
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Miró Henry Sobrer’s album, Two of Swords, recounts his struggle to find peace amidst conflicted feelings and thoughts after his father’s death in 2015. Following his father’s death, Miró found himself alone in a world full of political, environmental, and spiritual division. The music of Two of Swords reflects that world and the process of coming to peace with it. This album invites the listener to reflect on those dualities in their own life and to find the peaceful center that lies between them. Vivid poetry, and lush, surreal soundscapes that traverse a variety of jazz, classical, latin, and folkloric music join together to form this sound meditation. In order to take the listener on this journey, the album musically interprets a tarot card, based on the eponymous card from Miró’s father’s tarot book, The Book of Oracles, or a Poet’s Tarot.
Two of Swords, dedicated to Miró’s Catalan father, Josep (Pep) Miquel Sobrer (1944-2014), is an homage to Miró’s heritage and a recollection of his grief.
His father, an accomplished writer, translator, and scholar of Spanish and Catalan literature, wrote his own tarot book in a poetic format. The album centers around Josep’s text version of the Two of Swords tarot card.
The album features plentiful spoken poetry: the prose-poem corresponding to this card from Josep’s tarot book, and some sonnets by another Catalan poet Josep Janés i Olivé, whose poems accompany Miró's twisted-arrangement of a song cycle by the renowned Catalan composer Frederic Mompou.
As for the music itself, the album starts with spoken words from the first half of the “Two of Swords” entry in Josep’s book, accompanied by a muted trombone duet that foreshadows the melody from “Unity Suite part two”. This introduction leads into an epic arrangement of Mompou’s song cycle “Combat del Somni (Dream Combat)”. Miró’s arrangement contrasts starkly from the original due to his unique approach. He strips the original music of its flesh until all that remains is a skeleton which becomes a seed to nourish with a more modern approach. This regrows the piece and imbues it with fresh vitality. The next track, his composition “Aigües Profundes (Deep Waters)” introduces spoken words from the second half of the “Two of Swords” poem, superimposes them over a chorale, but then a violent rhythmic interjection leads into the main melody and groove.
After this, another original in three parts titled “Unity Suite'' progressively layers Indian Classical Music with Sardana (a Catalan folk music) and latin-jazz cha-cha-cha into a cacophonous harmony that is at once chaotically discordant and peacefully unified. An accordionist street musician inspired the final full-length track: a contrafact on the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” titled “Bridge Over The Tiber”. With lilting, quick-shifting rhythms, resemblant of tango and buleria, this song symbolizes the historic flooding of the Tiber river that runs through Rome. The album finishes by recalling its own inception, with the remaining text from the “Two of Swords” spoken over another muted trombone duet that trills and flutters away like a bird flying into the distance.
