This is the second release from ArpaViva, even though the company mistakenly maintains on the CD itself that it’s the first one… Their real first one – Postcard from Heaven – was a sensation in its own right, duly reviewed as such in many magazines and e-zines worldwide.

Victoria Jordanova is the hovering spiritual suspension behind these phonograms, soaring in zero gravity harp measures, in and out of the mindsets of listeners and unsuspecting soul drifters.

Jordanova uses a variety of harps and swings their lofty or humusy properties through technologies of her choice, always shaping new realms of audio; never playing it safe, never retorting to clichés or down-home formulas or principles. She never lets tradition wear her down. On the contrary, she shakes all those gluey, sticky memories off. This is a rare quality, not least among contemporary and avant-garde artists, who oftentimes are the most traditional ones, sticking to and canonizing an avant-gardism that was in swing a few decades earlier, in the 1960s or -70s. That’s how it appears in Sweden (where the reviewer lives) where avant-garde is spelled traditionalism, I’m sorry to say. Victoria Jordanova, on the other hand, breathes fresh air and moves through uncharted sonorities, which may contain shades and nuances of familiarities, but which, nonetheless, never completely enters those well-trodden paths. Her music moves in that spellbinding dream angle where everything is a wee bit off; rubbing off that hard-to-define strangeness on your present moment in the continuous flow of existence.

Such an originality and non-conforming stubbornness can’t be found many places. Two other such places are Björk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. I’m trying to get Björk the Polar Prize of Music, and I keep an electrifying connection up and running with Stockhausen, who, at 79, is the youngest person in contemporary music, which his latest work Cosmic Pulses amply proves!

The CD starts with two works by Cindy Cox, for electric Celtic harp.

Track 1. Cindy Cox: The blackbird whistling / Or just after (2006) [3:53]

This rippling haste over more extended tilting planes that reflect life hither and thither perfectly balances speed and rest, proving to be but two aspects of the same occurrence. Clarity is a glitter sparkle here, alien-dancing across the great divide of a distant world by a lone dancer who can only be reached by involuntary dreams and the pure chance of a ray of light in a dewdrop on a pine needle elsewhere, always elsewhere. The fragrance in this music originates on the soft skin of a fay in the corner of your eye, on the periphery of consciousness. Love.

Track 2. Cindy Cox: Hierosgamos IV (2005) [3:53]

This sports a repetitious, endlessly tolling tone, that in fact makes me think of a metronome keeping the beat, the way I’ve heard it in a piece by electronic music guru Lars-Gunnar Bodin. Three recurring darker tones, stepping downwards, bring a certain sense of melody, albeit rudimentary, to this very sparse and ascetic tune… but this mist-like, meager property allows your listening a fuller intake of those tones that DO sail by, given you a denser sensation than an actual dense composition: one of those playful contradictions of the laws of physics and perception. The meditation of Hierosgamos IV brings the smiling face of John Cage through the mere of inaccessibility that I keep around my own vulnerability. The pleasure of absentminded concentration.

Track 3. John Cage: In a Landscape (1948) [6:04]

And here he is, the Cage, un-caged as ever in Victoria Jordanova’s rendition through trice layered pedal-harp with contact microphones, in a fairy-of-the-river-bend-under-fern magic, in a sheer Somerset beauty that moves me to tears and a joy of sound that completely permeates the cloud of electrons that make me up. Wonder world, Jordanova spell! Yes, music out of photographs yellowed with age. Time sifting like sand over wrinkled hands; the love of a mother assuring you that all will be well, even though you’ve taken that fateful step into the suffering of a body… The craving for light.

Track 4. George Rochberg: Ukiyo-E (Pictures from the Floating World) (1976) [12:53]

By far the longest piece on Jordanova’s CD, Ukiyo-E (Pictures from the Floating World), is described in the booklet as “a sort of kaleidoscope or mobile, a series of gorgeous moments which alternate and cycle from one to the next, creating a dreamy space for contemplation and sensuous delight.”
I feel an Asian influx, a kind of koto barrier through which ascetic thoughts seep like light quanta passing everywhere at the same time, leaving that rhythmic pattern on the wall: the writing on the wall…
There is a lovely reasoning going on, a thought stream passing in a series of arrows across inner skies, appearing and disappearing, moving in and out of existence in that rhythmic vibration: the equilibrium of existence and non-existence, only very slightly out of phase, making possible the universe and its illusion. Life is an atmospheric disturbance. Carpet music.

Track 5. Victoria Jordanova: Secret Life of Bees: Swarm (2005) [3:11]

The rest of the CD presents Jordanova’s own compositions. Swarm from Secret Life of Bees is the first one, and is said to constitute “an essay into the classic murmuring technique of bisbigliando”! Be that as it may!
Jordanova scored it for 6 electro-acoustic harps, and here she performs all six harps via multi-tracking. You certainly get a feeling of something many-headed crawling upon solidity close by; you sense the vicinity bristling with a myriad of movements, and the feeling is unstable, nervous, on edge – on the edge of attack, of fierce venom hovering over your veins… but on this brink of something hazardous shines beauty bright: starships rising behind the shiny, venomous curvature of an insect world whining with glassy pizzicatos. Laboratory innings.

Track 6. Victoria Jordanova: Secret Life of Bees: Beehive (2005) [5:59]

Emerging on a fabulous drone and a wheezing of bow, Beehive brings an Australian telegraph wire meditation through the Outback of your mind. The booklet, however, lets on that Jordanova uses an electric toothbrush to achieve these desertland spaces. Further on up she lets the drone dissipate into a prickly pointillism of knuckled buckets, backyardish, maple tree swingish. Weathered.

Track 7. Victoria Jordanova: Secret Life of Bees: Go to Work (2005) [1:48]

Fingers playfully scratching and picking, resounding in small audionettes, falling all around like chestnuts, delicious through the season of mud and decay, of humus and fungi, of earthworms and coleopterous beings: insignificant details running at high velocities in the soil. Music running for cover. A brilliant display of colorful details dashing off like cock-roaches in the kitchen when you turn on the light at 3 AM (as I remember it from Blackwell apartments, Dallas, in 1979) Fright of the little ones. Survival Kit Kitty!

The last three pieces are collected under the heading Three Meditations, scored for two amplified acoustic pedal harps.

Track 8. Victoria Jordanova: Three Meditations: Trill (2005) [4:17]

The sound is larger here, filling a dome of space with maroon, yellow and silver: figures flashing up against darkness; icons painted with sable brush, rising out of matter into mind, Victoria Jordanova providing the latticework of existence, quavering from her harp in stringent stringy strangeness: alien thoughts meddling at the shell of ego.
The spacious atmosphere and the Tibetan colors free up rest and effortless focus. Gyangze.

Track 9. Victoria Jordanova: Three Meditations: Irish (2005) [1:52]

A deep voice below, and a lyric performance practice that once again brings me eastward, in a mezzo mode, perhaps to Japan, my mind still oozing with Tibetan recollections from the former piece and my friend Zoë’s journeys. This piece is so brief, but it could go on for a long time, a full CD, because you could base a meditation practice on it, in loose, relaxed concentration.

Track 10. Victoria Jordanova: Three Meditations: Happy (2005) [3:13]

The rippling, bursting flow of bulging tones appear as through water or crystal, like sea weed moving in elegant, ceremonious, courtly motions: light seeping down from above. My hands are touching a thick, uneven body of glass, sensual, even erotic; the roots of existence finding a path into the center of the planet. All is connected. Thank you, Victoria.