Anela Strings: Angel Music by Timeless Troubadours
By Marya Mann
A Live Concert
It’s just after sunset and Kristin Aria Shaw’s graceful fingers are dancing on her Celtic harp. Irminsul’s long hair billows in a soft breeze coming off the sea as his body vibrates with arpeggio sequences coming through his keyboard. I’m getting chicken skin.
The two members of Anela Strings are playing live in Kailua Kona, and if we are observant, we realize that if the gods went on a quest for the sound of light, they would find the sonic miracle in Anela’s music.
If we are open enough, we may sense that their music is more than entertainment. “It’s the language of the Holy,” says Irminsul.
Anela is the Hawaiian word for “angel,” while the “strings” are the combined majesty of their two lever Celtic harps: his black mahogany 36-string Troubador IV by Lyon and Healy and her Italian red mahogany Salvi concert grand pedal harp with 38 strings.
“We call our music the Language of Angels,” says Kristin, “because we go to a place that is not of this world to create it. The music is a language that speaks to the heart, the mind, and the body. It heals and clears you. We want to share their penetrating energies so you feel them,” says Kristin, an artist from Holualoa who also plays the West African djembe drum (prounounced jembe).
Irminsul, a Mormon-raised pagan, plays Celtic harp as well as a two-keyboard stack of high-frequency electronic resonance, and he also composes.
The acoustics in the room are superlative; the cushioned chair soft and comforting. From the moment they begin the concert with “Orbs” from their “Seven Rays” CD, my whole body relaxes.
The words cease in my mind, making writing about the music like dancing for the radio, yet I can’t help describing the vision before me. Kristin’s regal 5’7” triangular harp stands like a star, center stage.
Seated a step away from it, she keeps time with her djembe and her feet. Her eyes and eyebrows signal the rhythms while her hands perform a drumming ballet, patterns every bit as breathtaking to the ear as the ones she plays on her Salvi harp.
Irminsul manipulates his keyboard like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, swaying and swinging his head, turning thick amplifier knobs, fingering keys, and adjusting switches on his Roland JX-305 upper deck above the main keyboard. With what are apparently third and fourth hands, or wings, he pounds out harmonies that jostle his ruffled Beethoven shirt, vibrating in three-quarter time to the beat of Kristin’s drum.
A two-person band may seem small, and yet their sound is big. They call it “inspirational world music,” and you’ll likely find it in the instrumental New Age category under Ambient, Relaxation, or Meditation genres. Don’t expect Pollyanna music; their angels have passion and power they are not afraid to use.
Kristin moves to the rhythm of the djembe. It is no ordinary drum. It is a rope-tuned skin-covered goblet drum from West Africa which Kristin plays with her strong, bare hands.
As she leads into “Sojourn,” we start to feel something lost long ago. We don’t know what it is, and the tears come.
Irminsul zips up into a minor key, and Kristin’s drum rises to a crescendo. She looks to Irminsul. They lock eyes and at this wonderful signal, they stop. No sound. Silence. Waves of vibration, the air seeming sweeter to breathe, because of the silence.
“Kristin had a dream and she called me up,” Irminsul finally begins again, speaking into the microphone in the candlelight. “That’s usually the way it happens. We worked on that spark from there and it led to this song, “Field of Birds.”
Both play their harps. Kristin’s hands are like a bird’s beak pecking at sonic food. Her long blonde hair floats up from her necklace of pearls and flutters in the wind. The music is steady and fills us. A violet light shines in the creamy auburn pillar of Kristin’s harp and is reflected in the window beyond. It reminds me of the violet-colored vine cascading off the lanai of their rehearsal studio overlooking Kealakekua Bay, where I visited a few days before.
Intermission: Backstage with the Troubadours
Irminsul’s colorful 3-D computer generated artwork lined the walls and echoed the exact shade of violet. Although originally from Utah, he worked as an animation artist for a Los Angeles outfit, living abroad in Japan and China before he gave it up for a career in music. “It’s almost like you just know when it’s over,” he says.
“That’s the way it was with the jewelry thing too,” adds Kristin, who was born in Portland and made her living selling custom-designed crystals, gemstones, and porcelain jewelry before a mid-life career switch. “I was hanging in there because it was an income and I was raising a family.”
On Hawai‘i Island since 1985, Kristin has also worked as a therapeutic massage therapist and Reconnection facilitator while raising her two sons, Chama, now 33, living on Hawai‘i Island, and 28-year-old Michael who lives in San Francisco.
Things changed after Irminsul and his wife moved to Hawai‘i Island in 2009 and the two performers met for the first time. Kristin answered an ad for musicians posted by Irminsul on Craigslist. She auditioned, and was accepted into the band immediately.
It was a match made in heaven. The two harpists played their glissando-rich escapades in perfectly harmonized wholes, without rehearsing anything. It just flowed. “When I first met Irminsul, I had this eerie… like whoa… feeling. I already knew this guy from somewhere. He was very familiar.”
Their bond—creative and professional—deepened as they explored their mutually rich treasure troves of Celtic music and multi-cultural spiritual traditions. There were differences too: while Kristin attended music school from the age of seven to sixteen and worked hard on harp scales and arpeggios, Irminsul was given a gift of staggering proportions. “I’m self-taught,” he says modestly. Drumming was the natural gift given to Kristen, and together, their separate talents have soared.
They began with a World/Celtic band, The Kona Harp Ensemble, and performed house concerts before a show at the Aloha Theatre sold out. In 2010, Irminsul and Kristin branched off from the Ensemble to start Anela Strings with the intention of writing all their own original music.
They both credit the “big energy” of Hawai‘i Island for fostering their collaboration and inspiring the heavenly energy of angels. “I don’t know whether it’s this island, or just this side of this island,” says Irminsul. “Something here is really big when it comes to the angelic stuff. I came from Utah, of all places. And I’m a pagan, a good old Mormon-raised-pagan. It’s amazingly surprising to me that I’ve become what I’ve become.”
Hawai’i Island is indeed “angel central” for them. “It couldn’t be better suited for our work here,” he says.
Back at the Concert
The glow of violet light has permeated everything when Kristin speaks. “Grace is one of the highest forms of energy. There are no steps or static, she says. “It’s just a matter of asking, receiving, and being there.”
In “Heart Chakra,” the thunder comes. At the drum, Kristin looks down to the right at a point on the dappled floor, the candlelight burnishing between the awesome abyss and an awakening. The drums, synthetizer, the harp, the heat, the temperature of the flame of the one light, the one heart, flicker robustly inside of each.
Irminsul touches his hand to his heart. He’s a tall man, built for the outdoors, and yet with delicate, agile limbs. Kristin is a perfect partner to balance his insistent crescendos and decrescendos with her earth goddess steadiness, the sacred feminine with fire in her laughing eyes.
“Dreamweaver” empties the mind and fills the soul with a blending of tones, a vibration of innocence and vigor, and the arpeggios continue, infinity of energy. My mind goes, Ahhhhh…
Now they accelerate the pace with pieces from the “Archangel” CD, which won a Big Island Music Award in 2011. “Raphael’s Song,” a metered drumming with intense synthesizer undertones, stirs people to dance in the aisles. One of the most popular cuts on iTunes, “Raphael’s Song” can “sound as thunder, ripping the very fabric of the waking world,” he noted. “It can also speak as a Mother, whispering a shimmering call for us to return to our true natures,” she added.
A recent re-release of “Firesong” jumpstarts your neurons and makes your cells leap up and arabesque; “Fantasy in C” sparks the same settling sensations as Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” and illustrates the continual refinement that devoted artists are willing to put into their work.
Through the meditative interplay of the harp and electronics, Anela Strings’ music takes our hearts on a journey as the whole reassembles into a more unified state. We reconnect with a planetary field that reminds us to believe in ourselves as whole, and in nature as a Holy thing.
You don’t even have to believe it. Just listen to the music. ❖
Resources:
Manuel, Peter. Popular Music of the Non-Western World, (1988) p 236–241.
For events and private functions: AnelaMusic.com
Contact writer Marya Mann: MaryaMann.com
