Listen to Ingrid Karklin's Red Hand. I've listened to it for months, tried to tame it, tried to find a place for it. But it uses me. When I heard it would be self-produced and distributed, one copy at a time, from the artist herself, I was disappointed. Then I listened for the first time and realized that it cannot be contained by music marketing. It's a disc that stares you down, sings a siren song but evaporates if your attention wanders. A casual listen must be disappointing because the songs are too deeply personal, too poetic.

Red Hand is a bright, life-filled work, and it's an open wound. One never sees fresh blood without injury, without cutting the surface. Blood is life but provokes a visceral shock. Stop the flow of blood, bind up the wounds before it flows out. Red Hand, too, is a painful cut, a reminder of life and death balanced in harmony. It sings of the soul pain we hide beneath our living, the aching regret one feels when life seems suddenly tenuous.

The listener's challenge begins with the first breath. (And breath is everywhere in the music -- drawing in, exhaling.) A solemn, non-theatrical voice declaims an "Incantation":

Night's mouth held the morning
In a gentle, cool embrace

Not something you'll share at your next dance party. The mood is cast like a spell. The words are from a ceremonial bathing charm "to make one beautiful and irresistible." I am also reminded of Sylvia Plath's Colossus.

My fine skin breaking forth from the evil peeling
From my body
From my hip
From the skin of my skull
I hurl it from me

The intriguing contrast starts playing out. Naive poetry or something deeper? Does the music groove or will it haltingly slide into solipsism? Both, and neither. Ingrid Karklins gave up electronic keyboards on this album for acoustic piano, a steady sonic influence throughout. Grooves are provided by Steve Bernal's sinuous, chewy bass lines that are funky, lithe, and worthy counterpoint to the straight piano rhythms. Thor's earthy, balanced drums and percussion evoke anything from sticks on rocks to thunder and wind.

The piano must be reckoned with. "Red Hand" sets up the aural precedent for the album with an insistent single-note piano voice. It pulses, beats time, holds everything around a simple centering note. As the music deepens and the lyrics turn inward, that rich use of a grand piano supports this living musical entity. I am reminded not of jazz or blues piano, but the soulful piano of Laura Nyro's uniquely personal songs. But where Nyro drew from the blues, Ingrid Karklins departs from European classicism and ends up between folk and funk.

Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata was considered at one point for inclusion on this album, a full contrast with the subtle funk of "Ritual," in which Steve Bernal's bass work shines like a glimmer of faith and a smiling soft shoe dance. That spine-freeing bass line belies the fierce lyrics:

Drink me
Empty me
Dagger to bone
We parted in blood

The intensity of the album's opening gives way to the idyllic middle section, where one is drawn into the pleasure of voice and the chiming lap harp (the Latvian kokle). "Dreams" and "Raga" are the mesmerizing center of the album, so rich in suggestion and calm. Every listener can create a mental scene for the yearning ideal:

We should have never come back from Zion

It may be as close as I'll ever get
To living these dreams

The gentle heartbeat of "Raga" gives way to harsh recognition again, and the album's theme of duality becomes more explicit. Ingrid Karklins manages to dwell on the integration of life and death without becoming too enamored with, say, suicide as a poetic device, or madness as escape. No, there is simply another self, a second be-ing:

Your poet's heart
Is finally feeling through your skin

But I can hear the other heart

We have heard the other heart crying
There's another heart and she sings

The rage turns to dance, the life force joyful again. I still haven't found the right words for Red Hand. Ingrid Karklins' earlier CDs on Green Linnet Records (A Darker Passion and Anima Mundi) have at least reference points in folk and rock. They are ensemble albums with playful lyrical turns, bright contrasts and somber, subtle explorations. They mix lullabies with folk dances and rock that crashes and peals with thunderous abandon. In them the singer agrees to be a performer. Having seen Ingrid Karklins and Backbone live, I can vouch for the pleasant vitality of that musical experience.

Red Hand has those bright contrasts, but it is no stage work. It has been sung to small groups in intimate settings. Years in the making, it is carefully crafted, thought and rethought. And it is raw. Not the rawness of blues, but the rawness of a singer who has forgotten social graces and instead swirls away exploring the unprotected pain of the human heart. It's a hand-penned letter, a cry from the soul. It's being touched with a comforting hand as a murmuring voice speaks words into your ear that make you wince. It's a complete stranger looking you in the eye and asking what it is that you love.

Thus the last words on the album:

Deep mirror eyes
Feel our pain
Carry our passion ... compassion ... passion

Could say it's a gift
Could say it's a calling
We are electric
We burn

- Dan Maryon