Reviews
"Haunting cries of a life awakened to generational subjugation of women,
the loss of breath and voice …. Powerful material!" - Mary Ann Woodruff, Writer
General Reviews
“Cameron Altaras opens the doors to all that is hidden in the wardrobes of families, churches, communities and even the private spaces of the soul. Her incantations are provocative and haunting in tone and content as she explores the landscape of the spirit that is often unseen and unheard. These are paths on the road less traveled , which challenge the audience to reflect on the meaning of kindness and transgression. As you listen, you observe how the subtext becomes text and womanhood breaks free from cultural and religious restrictions. The echo of pain in her heart becomes an audible scream. Her impact, instead of showing us quick and easy solutions, empower each of us to create wholeness, justice, and peace.”
Read Lauren’s books: Rothko ; Prairie Lands, Private Landscapes ; Mennonite Ethics: From Isolation to Engagement
“In Returning to the Voice, Cameron Altaras unlocks all that was repressed, questions what she had been taught to be true, finds strength in finding her voice and creates a truth that is hers and hers alone. She shares a difficult journey to reclaim her soul, the journey is universal and when she gets to the end, the feeling is one of relief, like a cool drink that cures a painful thirst.”
-AP Hoag, Writer
On Beauty Becomes Her
“Cameron’s deep passion and beautiful voice resonate once again in this creative project. She continues to find new ways to explore and respond to the ancient patriarchal bondage that hobbles humanity’s hope and future, and to restore the divine feminine to its rightful and powerful place in our collective psyche.”
Visit Apollo’s website: Apollo Moonfire
““The un-binding-word that burst through my lips: NOW ! Another wow experience , brought about by you and your husband’s creation! Wow! Wow! “ ”
““I have always been fascinated by how the music of a movie soundtrack impacts the experience of the viewer. Take away the music, and the viewer is often left with a very different, perhaps unfulfilling experience. What is even more fascinating to me is when a powerful soundtrack has no visual. The listener, willingly or not, will create the imagery from their own universe of experience. Vocem Redisuum’s recent work “Beauty Becomes Her” creates a series of challenges, statements, and questions, suspended in a sound scape punctuating ideas or creating a precipice where the listener has no choice but take a leap. Cameron Altaras provides provocative poetry and vocals taking the listener on a journey exploring perceptions and realities forming our bias and world view. Jeff Altaras crafts longing tones that drift and suddenly pivot accentuating the lyrical journey. Cameron provokes …. “It’s so much simpler that way…..” eerily challenging our bias about so many issues facing the world today. We rationalize our thoughts and actions to our own demise. Accepting “The possibility that fear will not always rule…..” seems out of reach and yet, at our core, we all long for it. We are then reminded of the beginning time, when the earth flowed freely, unbound, unconstrained, taking the paths it freely chose. One can almost feel the healing breeze, and touch the flowing river described in the valley of the past. There is resolution, or perhaps the echo of a possibility of change…. “what is the word of unbinding?”. We exit the journey with the question we must ask ourselves to define and put into motion, so that we may change direction. Sit back and let Vocem Redisuum’s “Beauty Becomes Her” take you on a journey which may result in you looking within for answers to new questions.” ”
Listen to Terry’s music on Spotify
On Resistance: Confronting Violence, Power and Abuse in Peace Churches
““Sexual abuse casts a long shadow. Victims struggle with the lasting effects of trauma, often only coming forward to confront their abusers after many years have passed. Where do they find the courage? It may be the wrong question. When the burden of suffering in silence outweighs the risk of confrontation, there is often no other choice. In this groundbreaking book, Cameron Altaras and Carol Penner have assembled a plurality of voices to speak truth about one of the most pernicious and intractable forms of sexual violence—abuse by clergy within sacred settings, where victims don’t just find themselves in conflict with their abusers but may also have to confront institutions that have no interest in justice but wish only to protect their own.” ”
Read Clark’s books The Way of the Rose and Waking Up to the Dark and Seeds From a Birch Tree
““This anthology asks us to join in the work of reconciliation—not simply the ‘restoration of friendly relations’ but rather the wrenching, cruciform work of holding together our lives and experience with the largely dehumanizing systems that churn all around us while we summon God to end the oppression of avoidance and fear. It also reintroduces us to the meaning of regeneration—not merely a ‘radically renewed creation’ but rather our God-given ability to self-heal, grow, and recover after violence.” ”
““Even Peace Churches are not immune from the many forms of violence that religious groups can exacerbate through silence and complicity. Whether marginalizing women, excluding and demeaning 2SLGBTQIA+ people, or abusing through clerical and leadership privilege, these stories are all too familiar from other traditions and at the same time very particular to the denominations involved. This is brave and necessary work, well worth reading and heeding.” ”
On Bat Kol
“Unwrite these words from the landscape of my soul” is a dominant refrain in Vocem Redisuum’s Bat Kol, and the experience does indeed do that in a unique and powerful way. The title is a Hebrew phrase conjuring sacred resonance, and it is an apt term for this immersive aural experience. As a religious studies professor, I recognized all the names chanted in an indictment of a 2000-year-old “gender blame game,” but most listeners will want to consult the description for the full effect of the piece. It is a difficult challenge to take up—“unwriting these words” in a multivocal and multivalent soundscape. Mere cacophony could have been the result, but listening experience is anything but that thanks to the artistic, historical, and religious ground the piece offers. I say this truthfully because when I loaded it to listen, I had not signed into SoundCloud and was cut off after five minutes. Disturbed at the abrupt cut-off and wanting more, I quickly signed in for the full experience and was rewarded greatly. I have never heard anything remotely like this piece, and I was greatly moved by it. Since we are awash in words and images, it was a unique pleasure to be awash in a creative and critical soundscape that was both an indictment and a release. It is a “Sancti Canticum” (a sacred song) indeed that is integrative rather than reductive. “It rings” indeed. ”
“Another deep, poignant reminder of the blame and shaming of women from the garden and into eternity. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to unwrite this script from the ‘landscape of my soul.’”
Read Mary’s book Split: A Child, A Priest, and the Catholic Church. As a plaintiff, Mary helped win the largest suit ever against the Catholic Church. Through SNAP she works to end the epidemic of sexual abuse by clergy—specifically abuse by nuns.
“This is so unsettling, powerful, and uncomfortable. But it needs to be disconcerting. And if we aren’t moved to the most uncomfortable places when encountering this piece, we need to ask ourselves why we aren’t.”
Listen to Charlene’s music on Spotify and her podcast on Spotify for Podcasts
“This is an artistically breathtaking and impressive representation of two thousand years of misinterpretation and manipulation of biblical stories. The heartfelt cry for these words to be erased from the landscape of women’s souls resonates for a long time and is very understandable, but the question is whether this is desirable. What is written is written and must remain written to clarify how much suffering it has caused up to the present day. “To forget is exile, to remember is redemption”, is a famous saying of the Baal Shem Tov. This Canticum is a call to create a counter-script. Where it evokes an endless and never ending discussion, where one exhausts oneself to find justification for two millennia of mismanagement, the Bat Kol, just like in the stories in the Talmud, puts an end to it. The voice from heaven, more authoritative than any human voice, comes from G-d, who knows better than anyone about justice and righteousness, of the suffering inflicted on women. Only when this Opus Magnum results in a collective awareness, is room created for the Sancti Canticum, the sacred song.”
On “Artemis Patiently Waits”
“Do not view this work by Cameron Altaras if you like your goddesses contained on the page or within your carefully cultivated imagination. Altaras’ Artemis is in your face and fiercely confronts you about your mortal bullshit regarding gender and keeping “girlhood dreams to the side of the road.” Yes, Artemis patiently waits because she knows more than you ever will and sees the invisible tracks before you and where they lead, but do not be fooled by her apparent quiescence. She will not abide you “one generation to the next [keeping] women from giving birth to forbidden strengths.” This performance is shot through with “vibrant life” and offers a dramatic vision of arrows penetrating the facades of the patriarchy and its original sins. It is a powerful performance embodying both anger and grace and offering both ancient and contemporary wisdom. It is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
On “Thoughts of Existence”
[Under revision]
“She weaves in and out of internal conversations, musings kept secret for decades and arguments that could either drive one mad or catalyse compulsions that drive one forward.”
“Haunting and tumultuous. […]There was discord and disconnect in words and music that conveyed well the inner turmoil that haunt us and clang around in us when we have yet to make them go away. Saying them out loud in cries and thunder helps.
[…]Artistically, Cameron, brought me deep inside. I felt like I was being called into the recesses of my mind and soul. Both the highs and lows of her voice and music got home to me that unless we face our demons, name them we will indeed never move from that deep cry of “Why,” to a place of peace and harmony.”
“This work evokes embers from a fire thought long-quenched, flaming into brilliance.
Reminiscent for me of being impatient with childhood, and of post-seizure chaotic swirl.
Haunting reflections of being pulled deep underwater by cleaving one’s identity to thoughts, to thinking. Adrift in the labyrinth of thinking, as though thinking has the key to the puzzle.
About the courage it requires to release consciousness from superficial life, to swim down the flowing river, to save yourself from being lost in an eddy.”
““This piece challenges us to consider: Do you have the courage to look into the abyss of another’s pain and see your own face looking back? […] When we ask, ‘Why?’ is God saying, ‘Why not?’” ”
On “Voice of the Residue”
“Haunting cries of a life awakened to generational subjugation of women, the loss of breath and voice, the stifling of expectation, now determined to BE SELF, free, demanding release from even clear glass boxes. Powerful material!”
Read Mary Ann’s books The Last of the Good Girls.; Skylark
“Sound effects are amazing!!!! Very powerful and it affected me to the core. Pent up emotions, fear, anger just waiting to get out. Cameron has really conveyed the urgency of speaking out of the atrocities the so called Religious leaders have committed.”
“Best to sit on the floor while listening...you may faint from not breathing! An obsidian black cavern of pain spewed potently and deftly.”
“Oh my. Where to begin, what to say, where to go with this powerful piece.
I felt Cameron’s anger, pain, loss for what could have been and her agony of being in a glass box put there by matriarchy and patriarchy of her ancestors. I heard her scream for help to get out of the box — to break free by facing the truth. It’s not a “crazy notion” to do that, to want that. The beauty in this piece is how great music and voice come together to move to the very dark places of our lives and finally into the light. As a survivor of childhood abuse, I know what Cameron means when she shouts that schemes and lies choked her until finally she faced the truth of “him, him, him.” I also came to the same conclusions in my own journey to know and tell the truth. I found my voice. The life I am living now is my one precious life. Cameron cries, “I need to forgive me,” and the wisdom finally came. My truth telling led me to believe that forgiveness is about me. It’s a gift I give myself as I let go of the man who raped me. I gave him to God and the universe. No more do I carry him with me. Cameron’s words are mine, “I am no longer bound to shame . . . I am where the river changes course.” ”
“Heartbreaking description of compartmentalizing emotions, conforming to expectations, becoming frozen in that world. Blaming oneself for living with no fresh air. Yet a spark of resistance will not die despite being ‘stuck between dinner plates’.
The value of Rage in birthing one’s Warrior. Of Fury, to find fresh water. Of releasing, vs. forgiveness. Of finding a voice, vs. regret. Of owning that voice entirely, vs. beseeching to be believed. Of getting off one’s knees.”
“ There are more negative words in the dictionary that describe ‘woman’ than describe any other thing in the universe – whore, bitch, witch, harlot, tart, ball-breaker, temptress, hysteric, fallen, hag, piece of ass. Men filled the dictionary with their fear of us, mingled with their need. […] Thank you, Cameron Altaras, for the courage it took to bring this itch, this very feminine itch, this generational wound to life in your own voice. Brilliant and exceedingly powerful.”