Arto Tunçboyaciyan
Every Day Is A New Life

It's the sound that echoes through the narrow crevices of the Caucasus mountains. It's the arpeggio that slides, with passion and delicacy, among the animals taken to pasture by their herders. It's the soft tone that bounces, passionate and nostalgic, between the basins of the green and fertile valleys, while old men with marked faces move uncertainly, leaning on a cane, captivated by the delicate hues of the sky. It's the voice of a people who have suffered, a people repeatedly repudiated and denied, who rely on memories to not forget, who now demand justice.

But it is also a book to be leafed through, despite the yellowed, fragile, and slightly moldy pages. It is the story passed down from the elders to the young, those colorful and vibrant ones, on a sunny spring day. It is the perseverance of customs and traditions, balancing between the sacred and the profane. And it is also the desire to live, the desire to open that precious casket in which, for too long, the secrets and rituals of an unknown country were preserved.

"Every Day Is A New Life," Arto Tunçboyaciyan. Behind this unpronounceable name hides one of the many overlooked geniuses of the last two decades, an incredible multi-instrumentalist from Armenia—a mountainous country bordering Turkey, overlooking the Caspian Sea, sadly known for the genocide of the First World War—who for years has lived in the shadows, composing wonderful works in general indifference, with only the company of his trusted instruments (ranging from mandolin to sitar, piano, guitar, keyboard, and other indigenous instruments). In reality, if his solo productions have gone unnoticed by most, many of us have almost unconsciously heard him play with Pan flutes, half-full glass bottles, even his own bare chest. And it was in 2001: the ghost track inside "Toxicity"—an iconic album by System of a Down—Armenian like Our Own—was titled "Arto" and was played largely by Tunçboyaciyan, skillfully giving the Los Angeles masterpiece a strong connection to the roots of their homeland.

Certainly, this collaboration proves to be very little in light of the entire solo production, which began in 1983, and is a series of splendid frescoes and enchanting slices of daily/rural life, lovingly chiseled within a carefully selected instrumentation, capable of giving life to a whirlwind of truly exciting acoustic and visual perceptions.

"Every Day Is A New Life" is another, great work of Arto: released in January 2001, a couple of months before its brother "Aile Muhabbeti", it's a great collection of stories and folk legends, musically reinterpreted and modernized by Tunçboyaciyan's inventive approach. It is a continuous flow of notes that, like a waterfall, envelops the listener's ear to transport them to a parallel dimension, at times effervescent in its vitality, sometimes dazzling, mostly reflective and meditative. Without, for this reason, slipping into intellectual boredom and the useless baroque of new age.

Thus, one enters a trance with the suffering mandolin arpeggio that opens the ethereal "Broken Arm," a kind of divine invocation, full of blinding melancholy, which is accompanied multiple times by a piano before blooming into a series of ascending baritone choruses, with liturgical might. The tunnel of suffering, suddenly, transforms into a colorful greenhouse, symbolizing the hope of a physical but also spiritual rebirth, a metaphorical invitation to transcend life's difficulties with determination born of wisdom and inner instinct. Therefore, there are the cheerful chirps of the esoteric "Take My Pain Away," a bouncy journey through the mountain farms of the Caucasus among bells, flutes, and bizarre lullabies, sung strictly in Armenian: the playful sitar—reminiscent of an Architecture In Helsinki jam session—which leads, in a childish and wobbly game, the structure of "Simple Message"; or still, the seductive aroma unleashed by the mandolin of "Mystical Pine Tree", a stroll through the open-air markets of the Fertile Crescent.

Moreover, the primordial importance of preserving ancient customs, in a continuous dialog with young generations: the tribal, dark and occult rhythms, flowing into the searing trumpet of "Wooden Leg Grandpa", or the barely hinted Pan flute, of the lively and syncopated folk—there's even an accordion!—of "Baby Elephant", an embrace that unites the old with the new. But there is also room for two sincere and moving dedications, piercing straight to the heart for their intense spirituality: first, the filtered sadness of the winds in "I Miss You Every Moment My Brother", the pinnacle of sadness in the entire work, subsequently the celestial "Heaven For My Father", a triumph of Middle Eastern symphonies winding around a piano exoskeleton of admirable craftsmanship.