Maria de Alvear dedicates this double-CD to the medicine woman and poet Tsolagiu M. A. RuizRazo of the Cherokee nation, whose book Spirit of the White Wolf Woman de Alvear has published on World Edition. This remarkable shaman has provided the texts around which, or through which, de Alvear has woven her work.

This fact is very pleasurable to me, as I come to think about the Saami artist Åsa Simma Charles and her theater group Dalvadis up in Karesuando (which she left in 1990) in the northernmost part of Sweden.

Åsa Simma is married to a North American Indian – I forget what nation – and the Dalvadis group and especially Åsa Simma have meant a lot for the spreading of the spiritual, shaman word. I hear Åsa Simma’s hypnotic, low-key voice in my head as I write this… Connections, everywhere, connections and merging strands of experience!

De Alvear’s notes are always to the point, careful and detailed when needed, and here she notes that the piano was tuned to the Pythagorean scale and to a quarter-tone difference within the scale, which, of course, has an effect on the sounding result and the inner feelings this may evoke in the attuned listener. Tuning was accomplished by Ueda Kazuo.

A familiar name to connoisseurs of modern music – Daniel Wolf – shows up as he has provided de Alvear with his great gongs for the recording.

It is necessary to quote Maria de Alvear from the CD booklet. This quote not only gives the listener the opportunity to prepare for the experience, attuning perception and spiritual awareness and preparedness, but also tells a lot about de Alvear herself and the spiritual realm in which she goes about her compositional chores:

A few fragments of Tsolagiu M. A. RuizRazo’s texts:

The initial chords of the piano soar in at ankle level across the ground, slowly surrounding you like drifting mist, as the trombone calls out like a distant fog-horn out at sea, and the voice of Maria de Alvear rises piercingly through this soundscape, like a tower of searching mind through a bewildering bardo. The piano transforms into the reflections of moonlight across the sea just before Enrique Lozano enters for the first time in his altered Flamenco glissandi. The female and the male voices take turns, sometimes sounding simultaneously, as the music moves forth in an ominous, self-evident force along the distribution of time.

It is amazing how diverse and full the sound is, though the sources are limited to piano, voices, trombone and percussion! It fills space like a whole symphony orchestra, the sound gleaming and glittering in a revolving feeling, like a giant sphere of life slowly turning in mid-space, bursting with life and spirit.

I have never heard anything that sounds quite like this. It is indeed original, yet surprisingly familiar, which means that the music touches something inside, which can relate to it.
The quartertone tuning of the piano in the Pythagorean mood and the voices slipping through their glissandi pry into peculiar and wondrous halls of sound, of sound-mirrors and bulging, metallic surfaces. Wonderful!
At times the trombone soars parallel to the voice of Maria de Alvear, but not exactly on the same note; perhaps a quarter-tone off, bending the sound in tensely brilliant curvatures, creating charged force-fields inside the calmness!

The tuning is crucial to the magic impression of this music! Listen how the sparse chords of the piano come across as if they’re emerging from a dream or a daydream or the corner of the eye, affecting the emotions, the colors, but from an unexpected angle, making me think of the hidden dimensions of the latest findings of quantum mechanics and string theory!

It is a stroke of genius to restrict the sound sources to these few ones, allowing for the mystery of them all to rise in this magnificence!

At 30’48’’ the tempo quite suddenly changes as the pianist starts hitting a single note as if in Terry Riley’s In C (the pulse), while Daniel Wolf’s gongs go to work too. It gets quite intense. The male and the female voices rock back and forth, taking turns, joining, splitting up, joining, taking turns – and the uptempo gets even more uptempo, but lower down in the register. The motion picks up strength and might as well as gravity, moving in a relentless gesture of persuasion.
Percussion makes itself audible in short bursts of a dark drum, underlining the sense of utmost speed in these parts. The piano pulse keeps on keeping on. Indigenous rock n’ roll!

The trombone slices time into layers of gold, the piano rolls out beads of blue glass spheres all over the floor, the voices meander, circle, spiral, extend, withdraw – sketch… and etch! – while the percussion ripples the ocean of sound with ever-expanding, concentric rings of good intentions, good medicine!

As CD 1 nears its conclusion, the music winds down into a meditative gaze into Self, where the inner equivalence of outer space opens up, so that we clearly feel we are like trees and mirrors; trees with branches reaching into outer space an roots into inner space; mirrors in a hall of mirrors; mirrors looking into one another, opening up endless realms… and on that note CD 1 slowly oozes out into Mother of Sound, from whence it was born; Silence…

Similarly, the music on CD 2 opens like a flower out of Silence, out of Un-Light (not Darkness), slowly reclaiming sounding space with colors of tone, sacral timbres – and Maria de Alvear’s strong, beautiful voice touches me like an outstretched tongue, licking my face, my closed eyelids, my forehead in crimson lust. Enrique Lozano provides the maleness to counter-act the femininity of de Alvear, and a sort of completeness permeates the soundscape, trombone sketching calligraphic signs across the horizon while dark drums provide a heartbeat, familiar to anyone having been born. The piano applies intellectual efforts to this otherwise totally intuitive art.

The music grows ever more hypnotic, almost on an erotic level, wherein transformations of mind might and may take place.

I burn some incense and sit back, letting it happen. I soar… soar… in lustful weightlessness across the wide-open eye of the clear pond of mind out of which I and you come…