This is a CD that Malcolm Goldstein never thought would be produced. He sent me his Hardscrabble Songs on a cassette a year or so ago, stating that he was waiting for the European label that had undertaken the task of release to get back to him, but apparently it had taken longer than foreseen to get things going, and Goldstein had almost given up on the project – but then I recently got a message from Théo Jarrier of In Situ Records in Paris that the new Goldstein CD was due in the fall of 2004, and today it fell through my mail slot, so here it is, spinning inside the bleak laser light of my player; Hardscrabble Songs and other pieces, and to my surprise a Goldstein string quartet, performed by Quatuor Bozzini, which celebrates its 10th anniversary as a quartet in 2004.

A new Malcolm Goldstein CD is an event. There is no violinist like him, for he has taken the instrument far beyond its presumed limits, shaping a music, which shines and glows inside this fairytale atmosphere that is the mind and spirit of Malcolm Goldstein.

I vividly recall my amazement at hearing his two first releases; a couple of vinyls with his Soundings, released in 1980 and 1985 on his own label. It was composer, producer etcetera Folke Rabe who pointed him out to me in a radio series on Swedish radio that Rabe produced in the 1980s, dealing with modern American music. Rabe encouraged me to get in touch with Goldstein; I got those two vinyls, and kept on the lookout for new Goldstein material from there on.
Since then a steady but sparse flow of CDs have arrived from the hands of this violin guru, sometimes on solo violin CDs, sometimes on CDs in collaboration with others, and primarily with German master percussionist Matthias Kaul. All in all I can count to 9 CDs and 2 vinyls in my Goldstein collection, and they all belong in my absolute favorite batch of recordings from all times; sparkling with ingenuity and the intense creativity of a free man on Earth.

Track 1 is called My feet is tired, but my soul is rested (1985).

Goldstein:

I have never heard Goldstein quite like this, in this moaning on-the-porch blues kind of way, even though this southern atmosphere is just slightly hinted at here. There is a distorted melody line in here, quite readily accessible, in fact – and perhaps this is what renders the piece its strangeness, because you usually don’t detect melody in that sense in Malcolm Goldstein’s works; not in this fervent, affectionate way, but more often – if the term melody is at all applicable – in a fragmented, on-the-fly manner, lightly, like sunlight through windy trees or fleeing patches of light across the fields under drifting summer clouds a breezy day.
There is arguing going on in this music, a voice that clearly tries to get across, drive home a point, persuade someone or a whole world or even herself.

Goldstein, at times, reappears inside this piece like I’m used to hear him, in infernal and stubborn pickings and scratchings – but ever so often he leans out in this strange melodic kind of eagerness that swells inside the music… and sometimes a calmness sets on the feverish communication, the rampant arguing, perhaps reflecting the resolve and courage inside Rosa Parks as she decided to stay put, up front in that Montgomery bus at that crucial moment that indeed changed the world for so many, for us all. I suppose Goldstein, in this unusual work of his, circles and spirals this crucial moment, this time and place of so much importance that would show itself as events unfolded. Somehow Malcolm Goldstein defines this moment in his artistic expression, as his violin talks passionately on the subject. Towards the conclusion the musical words of the violin trickle out in a dense stream of morphemes which trip over each other, falling all over the place in heaps of fragmented sentences and in large piles of letters all jumbled up, vibrating, emitting a glowing energy.

There is a wonderful live feeling to this piece too; an occasional cough and a propeller airplane that passes up above – and it is a live recording, of course, from Vandæuvre, France, 17th May 2002.

Next piece, at track 2 – Soundings (2002), was also recorded at that same concert.

Goldstein:

Ah, it is in his Soundings that Malcolm Goldstein occupies himself with fundamental research into the origin of sound, violin wise. Here the violin is the probe that bores into deep sound space, retrieving the unheard and the unplayed, in binary returns on the CD disk.
Here his art is free of tradition, the violin free of itself, the sound returning with a reverberation of the gesture; the physical gesture, the spiritual gesture, the un-gesture at the heart of gesture, the un-sound at the heart of sound – from the basic emptiness at the heart of matter, at the heart of all – and there is a slight commotion at the surface of un-existence, called (this ripple); existence… where Goldstein scribbles a fragility of line, which is the character of his imprint in Silence, his temporary negation of a negation; a surplus of spiritual agendas whirling by on the edge of the moment, a vanishing line; fragile music on the brink of the silence from whence it rose, into which it falls back, silently, into silence… these Soundings…

Screws and bolts, bits and pieces, shrapnel and broken wood; these are the cut-up residue that falls off of Goldstein’s violin in this unheard-of way of prying sound out of this formidable instrument, this haywire violin, turning back on itself, screeching, scratching, sometimes cutting itself into sonic shreds, disappearing into paintings – Chagall, Miro – only to appear somewhere else, in other rooms with other views, other circumstances, reappearing in long, winding solos of intensity, or backlashing shadow plays, hardly audible in the sunlight of silence that surrounds our hearing.
A Goldstein Sounding is a vehicle into the ultimate discovery of sound, which, almost surprisingly, may bring a bleak dawn of beauty on the circumference of your life in its eternal Now; a madly swinging horizon at the outer reaches of imagination, soothing, ringing like elves’ bells at your fingertips…
I don’t want to let go of this moment, of this sensation that Goldsteinean Soundings offer; I bid me sit down in this bending and wrangling of Silence that curves around and around itself through all these dimensions of quantum mechanics, out of Goldstein’s own string theory; vibrations, dust and more silence…

Track 3 is Hardscrabble Songs; songs of difficult times (2000), which lent its name to the whole album. Hardscrabble Songs comes as one track on the CD, but it really consists of four songs. At the time when Goldstein sent me his Hardscrabble Songs on a cassette, he also submitted a copy of the original manuscript:

On the cassette Goldstein also introduces these songs. Almost the same introduction is printed in the booklet:

The cassette with a copy of the original recording that was sent to me before has a lot of hiss and extraneous noise. A great job has been done to get rid of that noise, so the end result on this CD is dramatically better, but the listener will still notice that the sound isn’t as good as on the preceding tracks. However, given the uniqueness of this recording, and the quality of the artistic work itself, this minor setback means really nothing.
These songs aren’t long. The whole piece with the four songs is just about 13 minutes long. The recording was made at a Signal to Noise concert in Burlington, Vermont, 18th November 2000.

It is a peculiar experience to hear Goldstein open with his violin in a an almost melodic gesture, directly joining in with his voice, sing-talking the text of the first song - America To Me – as the melody deteriorates into the frenzy of picking and wrenching that we’ve grown accustomed to, his voice bouncing and thudding in wheezing and saliva spitting wordings above the violin staccato shreds that move relentlessly like a mud flow with branches and rocks and cars and all kinds of civilizational residue down this raging music.
The text of the song further enhances this impression of relentlessness, this feeling of the passage of time no matter what, through good times and through disaster, through calm Buddha days to nervous breakdowns; society’s remnants in a verbal and violinist afterglow, in some kind of hindsight… and the violin is played like gravel, played like was it a gravel rake; Goldstein is raking gravel in this American piece…

The second song, starting with the line “not known, not knowing”, opens in a rubber band violinism, stretching and contracting on the small scale, as Goldstein starts his text with guttural, unintelligible, half-uttered exclamations and withheld hound dog howls, but soon he intersperses these sound poetic exercises with the words of the song, all along gushing forth with his intense, flickering kind of violin soundings, the words – the voice – and the clattering violin whirling about in a violent motion that seems, in a strange way, stationary, static; a whirlwind stopping right in front of you, madly spinning!

The third song, beginning with “time… time… not… time”, starts off with a series of bow bounces, a series of elegant outbursts, angled this way and that, perhaps involving all the directions, perhaps sweeping the horizon with searching lights… the interior of this goddam universe…
As the ground down pieces of violin sounds rush by underneath like a flow of grains or gravel, Goldstein appears with an almost noble accent, uttering the first words of the song; time… time… etcetera, in a stand-up-violinist kind of way, the music more trashed and re-constructed than ever, always taken apart in a frenzy, bounced about and reflected this way and that, much the same way you can fragment pictures in the Photoshop filter shatter! All these shattered fragments of bow striking string glitter and sting like broken mirrors in starlight and mosquitoes in Lapland. It’s a fascinating and sometimes painful – but always rewarding – experience.
The cutting up of morphemes continue through this song, the letters almost choking on each other, Goldstein sounding like he’s breathing chalk dust – until he starts whistling Somewhere Over the Rainbow in an inward manner… reaching the last laconic bye bye, when the song comes to a halt…

The last of the Hardscrabble Songs, the fourth one – Oh can you see – takes off on a barbed wire note; a long, scratchy, sharp progression, cutting through the silence like the blade of a long, rusty butcher’s knife that’s been left to its rusting fate by a vegan attack – and at long last Goldstein appears, in hollers and howls behind a curtain of dampening fiddle engravings on the face of time, semi-transparent… and I can hardly make him out inside this grainy sound which covers the moment in gray and white lines, like the lines on old black and white photographs of Kit Carson or Bill Cody…
Hoarse voice and husky violin merge, grabbing hold of each other, disappearing inside each other’s characteristics, and a slithering, vibrating line of sound disappears into silence… Hardscrabble silence in Burlington, Vermont… like passing shadows of clouds over the fields in a poem by Erik Lindegren.

These are extremely powerful songs, outstanding in their honesty and nakedness and their unpolished appearances, raw and fresh out of the dangerous creativity of one of the most original artists of our time, shoveling gravel and stardust and big heaps of relentless silence, dust and saliva and swallow’s nests…

Track 4 has the not so inconspicuous title Where are we going when we’re standing still, looking backwards?! (2002)

Goldstein:

The piece was recorded at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado, 24th August 2002.
It commences in a soaring mimicry of silence; as a shadow of silence creeping across a silently sounding topography, a thin line being sketched along the curvature of existence, a wobbling progression of a thought direction, close to the ground, around pebbles, under leaves of grass, over roots, crossing ant paths…
Eventually Goldstein gets into a more expressive mood, rising out of the topography on stilts, casting sudden long shadows across the land, until inching back down into the track that he was following, that he was making, this chalk mark across the rocks; an ascetic traveler’s meager diary; a line in the landscape – a band of indigestive violin tones scrambled together and drawn out into the periphery of it all…
Later on the violin, in Goldstein’s hands, gets fiercely verbal, conversational, rattling off like a whole hen-house experience at fox-calls… but this is temporary, as the music again forms a line through space, expressing either a kind of directional determination, or a total loss of such, just letting go; a kind of violinist orbit without a cause…
After a while I realize that the line through the soil gets harder, deeper, as the sound becomes more brutal, leaving a deep furrow behind… and the sound torments and hurts… until, again, this thin, transparent shadow of silence is all that has any direction, towards the horizon, any horizon, which just falls away, falls away, the line reaching towards it, as it falls away… in this sound that is a shadow of silence…
When three, four minutes are left, the music starts taking on the sound of a rusty wheel slowly turning out of the grip of time, freeing itself off this cast-iron predicament of predictability, shaking itself loose of the gravitational pull of this dreary old cause and effect drill of causes and effects that may tire and bore anyone…
Chalk-and-dust sounds simmer and shimmer through the act of listening, as Malcolm Goldstein gradually disappears into the sound world of Where are we going when we’re standing still, looking backwards?!, leaving winding traces of silence behind; unsounding proofs of sound, withering residue of vibrations and memories of vibrations through the space-time continuum score of scores, the music of the spheres…

Track 5, the final work on the Hardscrabble CD, is an unusual work in Malcolm Goldstein’s oeuvre; a string quartet! Goldstein calls it A New Song of many faces for In These Times (2002), dedicated to the quartet that performs it; Quatuor Bozzini.

Goldstein:

This string quartet in one movement is the longest work on the CD with its 19 minutes. It was recorded at Théâtre la Chapelle in Montreal 4th May 2002.

It begins rather matter-of-factly, a cat’s walk up the alley, whiskers shaking in a guarded way, nothing really bothering the day, nor embellishing it either. This is a trudging progression, at times drooping seriously before picking up some everyday courage again, no grand gestures, nothing to take much note of – just a string quartet made up of four shadows of silence intertwined across the asphalt…
The music doesn’t stay in that atmosphere for too long, though, because the quartet gets into rattling bow bouncing dances and other Goldsteinean behaviors, though the overall dryness of the sound keeps even the ferocity of some expressions a little on the chalk side of the blackboard, intellectually trimmed and spectacled, in a New England kind of way… brick buildings and learned deans…

I have heard some string quartets out on a limb, by, for example, Iannis Xenakis and Giacinto Scelsi – but I think Goldstein outshines their lunatic wittiness with this limping, scratching, bouncing and rake dragging quartet, which – even in its intellectual chalk dust guise – manages to pull this art form into untraveled realms for strings, which could be a suiting subtitle to the work; Untraveled Realms for Strings…

The players are kept surprisingly still and silent almost throughout, to the extent that the hiss of the tape – or the soaring ambience of the live event – rises almost to the level of the sounds from the instruments. After listening to about half the piece, I find it quite introverted and seriously meditative; a good vehicle for staring out the window when it rains, or staring at the ceiling while lying down… and I feel some age in this music, layers upon layers of experiences thinned out and refined in this raking process for strings, that finally touches your forehead with the soothing touch of your mother’s wrinkled old hand…