There are some very special prerequisites for this so-called opera. The term opera has a wider meaning than we usually allow it, but even so, it is doubtful whether this piece of sound art would fall within those more spacious definitions. However, if we think about Morton Feldman’s so-called opera Neither, it’s easy to observe that that is even farther away from mainstream opera as we traditionally perceive it. With that in mind, 4 / 25 / 65 – An Opera is not that much out on a limb. Maybe I would rather call this a piece of radio art; with a German term Hörspiele, or with the corresponding Swedish term hörspel.
An objection to that may well be that there is too much music in here to lawfully call it Hörspiele… I’d say that it comes close, though, to some of Åke Hodell’s brainstorming, barnstorming radio art pieces, if you’d serve these with more music, electronic and acoustic. Maybe the closest affinity is that with Alvin Curran, though, thinking about pieces like For Julian (which won the Prix Italia in the late 1980s) and Crystal Psalms, as well as the intriguing, very poetic Maritime Rites.
Yannis Kyriakides’ masterworks in the genre – a conSPIracy cantata and The Thing Like Us; the latter based on Spinoza – are much more fine-tuned and delicate than Glass’ and Bumsteinas’ work, but there are similarities – and frankly, we can call it whatever we wish; that doesn’t matter. Listen and enjoy the excitement and the thoughts that arise!

Bumsteinas notes, in his introduction:

The special prerequisites that I referred to concern the source material that the composers have been working with. The vocal parts of this material have been contributed by collaborators, whose names you find above.

Bumsteinas further explains:

I recommend the reader to access Bumsteinas’ and Glass’ whole texts about the opera venture, linked above. There you will also find the historical and intellectual background that spurred Jesse Glass to do the writing.


In 4 / 25 / 65 – An Opera’s CD guise we’ll have to rely on sound and sound only, though, so that is what I deal with here. It strikes me that I’ve been engaged in similar visually deprived sound works before, i.e. sound art that originally also included visual material. I’m thinking about The New Culture Quartet (Folke Rabe [trombone & other instruments], Jan Bark [trombone & other instruments], Fuzzy (Jens Wilhelm Pedersen) [flute, clarinet, accordion & other instruments], Thord Norman [viola]) and their multi-media circus Ship Of Fools (Narrskeppet), evolved over a number of years.

The Prologue of 4 / 25 / 65 – An Opera immediately triggers a full course of visions and associations in my mind, as intriguing music always does: The purring Cat of Consciousness warming up in its basket, the spiraling motion of freewheeling thoughts sketching an environment of distant black mountains, and the grassy expanses between me and them, fresh with oxygen, clearer for each revolution the sound-thoughts make, wiping condensation off of the Window of Mind. Patterns of light dance in soundless visual shifts; random art of the elements, like a movie from an African savannah with the sound turned off.

As I have written the paragraph above I recall a dream I had a month or so ago, that I jotted down when I woke up. It was a kind of vision dream; not a dream that dealt with everyday life or things you could immediately refer it to, but a dream from much deeper realms. I saw a cat sitting on a cubic rock, revolving on it. The rock was perhaps 1 x 1 x 1 foot, and the cat had been rotating so long that it had left deep circular tracks in the rock. The cat looked at me and said:

Jesse Glass says about the beginning of 4 / 25 / 65 – An Opera:

Prologue starts with that saucepan lid purring, circling like the cat in my dream, slowly building up intensity and presence in a peculiar rag-tag static-and-modality of contrasting elements joined-up; ensemble dee-dums and whiskers! Seems to me the element of time is spread out thick here, mixing scoop-ups of long-gones with the present and maybe a smidgen of the not yet experienced too, if approached in a linear sense – but of course, time is not linear at all. All places are here; all times are now – and this is that homey standard time feeling I get when I hear Prologue. The universe is our home, so nothing can be all that strange, and I like falling though these submerged motions/emotions; an orchestra of free or liberated will playing on the deck of a sunken ocean liner!

The wordless singing introduced towards the end of this part renders the music a happily lone fragrance; that of a wayward stranger lost in his couldn’t-care-less journey across the bottom of the ocean floor, crowds of hippie-fish blasting by in happy electric hoorays!

Bumsteinas makes much of little, and we like it! Fantasy fills in the blank-and-blonk spaces, and if you’re up to it, you’re in for a rough ride in a heinous machine! The intrepid flow of electronic and chamber ensemble sounds is thrilling – and when you find out, through Bumsteinas’ written introduction – that none of the musicians actually met to play together, but were recorded separately, the sense of disparate, thorny bliss is woven around your pleasure like venomous silk! With a Rileysh minimalism of a few repetitious seconds, Prologue ends in beauty and a scent of Nag Champa.

First Song is one of the longer parts of the work. Hitting off with radio static or perhaps steam wheezing, you’re pushed into a room of world radio paraphernalia, into which a growing radio hum is paired with chanting by Jesse Glass’ students and his family and friends, growing in different colors and fragrances in your left and right ear, poking at the part of yourself that lies curled up like a snake in some idyllic self-affliction… as the sense of cherry wood and hickory intarsia is rolled out in delicate Annapolis sea-resort and Naval Academy loftiness all around.

The chanting of voices in both ears/speakers swirls your mind into a hypnotic cat-on-rock circling that soothes and reveals, erases and engraves. It is very pleasurable and tickles nerve-ends all along your spinal vertebral column if you’re a vertebrate! It makes your nose-tip tingle, your fingertips go numb and your eyelashes glow, like an ominous presentiment of a migraine attack or a spontaneous ejaculation in the midday sun!

After a while (too short! I could listen for a whole CD to this dark-brown hum and light-brown chanting!) a trembling breathing draws close. The inhalations and exhalations, with short pauses filled with anticipation, give an impression of almost indecent pleasure or pain, as if the breather doesn’t care if she dies or survives the experience she is involved in; the slow, trembling breathing pulling existential debris from all walks of life into its very center like a black hole in space. Fascinating! It’s like sex in the sauna; hot, moist, unforgiving and necessary! It consumes you and leaves you blank and soaring, at one with every atom of the universe, until thin wires with little cubes of lead attached are entangling you, as gravity is switched back on...

A sparse atmosphere of more misty or sandpapery sounds out of the oral cavity engulfs you in a saliva-rich breath of sighs and whispers, and a high-pitch over-load tone from the relay interlocking plant of your brain lingers out right as a warning.

The sonic construction work being done here is breathtaking!

In the background mumbling voices talk, but to begin with you cannot make out the words. However, after a while you hear the words well, but they’re impossible to put into context. The female voice is beautiful, and a male voice, very thin, as if heard through a telephone, irritates at right. The close-up female voices also recede, and that sharp alarm tone is even more accentuated.

I take a break here and listen to Björk’s all-vocal Medulla CD for a while. It fits pretty good into the general atmosphere of Glass’ and Bumsteinas’ operatic operation.

Lincoln Song touches you like the fresh fragrance of a forest flower, as light is seeping though the gaps between the trees, momentarily spot-lighting the colorful petals of the lonely dweller.

Someday Man will have to bow to a Flower and ask forgiveness.

Various voices placed at different angles speak simultaneously, as the music of the sunlight touching the flower rises in serpentines through the audibility. Some backwards passages open a more sturdy, yet staggering and stuttering marching idea, and politics are refracted through the dew that’s been hid in the shade of Giants of the Woods.

The trumpets and the voices shortly transfer my imagination into renaissance domes.
In those spacious contexts Bumsteinas and Glass offer Petr Kotik-like, Gertrude Stein-like linguistics, like sudden parasol mushrooms in September! I chew the words, and the rancid smoke of generations of chitchat fills the ceiling of my oral cavity, escaping out of my nostrils, dragon-wise.

The way the composers have displayed the voices and the rhombs and rhomboids of acoustic music (sliding, shifting, appearing, disappearing) is very exciting and often surprising; fresh! A very close female sing-talking voice may suddenly be relieved by an ensemble of instruments onto which human voices are glued like a racing tube to a Trek rim, Armstrong-wise, Basso-wise, like a fence disappearing away into the mist across a meadow, space and direction and matter at one with each other through all their diversity!
Sometimes the voices seem to be recorded off of a 78 rpm, and then suddenly rising brisk and coherent in state-of-the-art audio. Diversity is the name of the game! Playfulness and yet a strictness that impresses!

Printing Office introduces a narrative about the main character in the opera, the proprietor of the Westminster Democrat, Mr. Joseph Shaw. The narrative, delivered in a rather typical, but perhaps a little softer-than-CNN style, with a slightly permuted male voice, explains the situation after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Shaw’s ill-timed remarks in his newspaper.
The story is accompanied and permeated with heavier permutations, stumbling concrete sounds and a general playfulness of sonic sarcasms. It’s a remarkably slick mix of congested audio and spoken word, pneumatic drills, factory whistles, the drones of trucks, the brewing of a crowd, the final second of a symphony and lingering applause falling like precipitation through our story.
The grim end of Mr. Shaw and his printing shop is delivered towards the conclusion of this section. The vocal applications vary as usual, and one more ingenious and rather unusual measure is standing at a good distance, shouting the story, as from the other side of a soccer field!
Bumsteinas and Glass know how to keep the listener interested! (keep the customer stupefied!)

Editor’s Song stamps and treads big, heavily - and seriously……… paused……. darkly swaggering slabs of words in a robotized Marvin million-year-melancholy; shreds of sentences like oiled pieces of machinery in a morpheme-spitting contraption, in hues of dark infra lines and high-pitch tone-dial trajectories, not unlike the nasal whistlers on Uranus caught in a NASA Voyager flyby. There is a relentless force in this slow, word-stamping sound machine, envisioning an Abrams tank bent on the destruction of its target, approaching slowly but surely… Editor’s Song has an old, slumped, laid-back sense of assured destruction to it, making it dark and vicious, but in an unconscious way, pre-programmed and fully unaware… hi-jacked by hi-tech ill will and mean elves glittering all along the barrel.

Allegorical Song, splintering glass and barrel-organs, a mixture of early Denis Dufour Bocalises (1977) and 1966 New York loft Terry Riley single-handedly performing Untitled Organ on a Jaipur harmonium, the nails clicking and scraping against the keys in a lost Golden Age of Rare Glimpses…

A calm circling motion in the music possesses these sharply tumbling, glassy shrapnel, and a cozy, British Donovan or Incredible String Band tapestry ballad is hung across the soundscape. Time for meditation and deep space insights, as this Glass/Bumsteinas Deep Impact probe hits Tempel 1 in a sudden 100 000 kilometer per hour Allegorical Song connection.

I pull the veil of the Northern Lights tighter around my material body and shiver some…

Madman - (Intermedia) gushes a wide array of broadside vocals at you, as you walk in the shadows sporting your dark trench coat, pockets filled with mothballs – and it’s past in a flash, leaving your gravitationally captured existence to the next entry; Narrator’s Song.

The cranky and crevassed Lou Reed voice that opens Narrator’s Song hurtles me into depraved, degenerated New York 1970s’ Wild Side Park Avenue Max’s Kansas City Velvet Underground nights of youthful journeys across America’s glossy surface, hiding so much venomous animosity down the side streets of Moloch Capitalism…

The organic bands of candy bar music that licks the stereo picture abandons me in a kind of cartoon, Singing-In-The-Rain 1940s’ loose-fit, which pulls me into a relaxation that I wasn’t looking for… but which has its treasures, slowly growing on me like lichen on a Scandinavian ice-age rock well hidden in forested amnesia…

Hero’s Song pries the perimeter open with a quirky description of a knife, a bowie knife… Repetitious chanting and bulging, swaying fields of soft audio billow into an oriental carpet of slowly progressing might.
Percussive measures are taken, and a Malcolm Goldstein Vermont fiddle phrase stubbornly sketches the same short figure time and again inside a myth of voices that assemble for dubious purposes – and then sudden pitch silence; a child stopping dead in her running tracks behind the barn a dark night of fall, to gaze up at the stars, her heart pumping there in her flesh as the Earth curves and the silence thunders in post-run immobility full of the principle of inertia…

A Kletschmer melody approaches across Central European plains, seeping into nocturnal cities and closed parks full with bird sleep behind iron gates…

I think of the Dalai lama and feel good.

Madman – (Intermedia) recurs in a narrowed-down trickle of deprived audio, as a King’s Trail suspension bridge between Hero’s Song and Song For A Murder.
Thunder, rain – and a story told. “An invisible ghost, hovering outside my body”… Yeah, that sets the stage, the pace, the… odor. A description of a wound… Decay and rising mist. Barbed wire in the haze. Trenches. Mud.

Ghastly vocal permutations… senselessly altered paces… cut-ups, repetitions… closed atmospheres… whispering voices of spirits gathered ‘round the dying person; Lincoln, Kennedy, X, King, Kennedy, Gandhi, Sadat, Palme, Lindh… “He will not get away anymore”…

This is a spellbinding section of Bumsteinas’ and Glass’ work; brilliant, scary, tempting and mystical…

Descending – (Intermedia) scrambles a host of voices in a derelict choir of jagged, disparate trajectories of human scent, eventually softening into a lower and closer density, yet again rising into more high-pitched femininities collecting into an eventual downwards glissando of overseas caresses… a gonorrheal embrace by the Seine…

Epilogue casts a incantation net across events, closing down this sonic and moral adventure, this up front, point blank seizure of historic tics of Mankind and Western Shortcomings in a sweet, yet time-filtered agony of a beauty that rivals Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic – Arturas Bumsteinas’ and Jesse Glass’ inward spiraling down the path of consciousness, littered with sonic debris and morphological shreds that sum us up in a flash light circle of light; a shoal of steel colored fish turning all at once on a backdrop of the mighty hull…