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Malcolm Goldstein It’s nice to find Malcolm Goldstein on a major label. Not that I have anything against the small, causal, experimental, low-budget or no-budget labels. They release much of the music that I take special interest in, and quite a few Goldstein CDs (on labels like Ambiances Magnétique [well, maybe not such a small label!]; in situ; Eremite; dacapo; True Muze; Experimental Intermedia Foundation [not so small either!]; What Next? Recordings; Emanem; Bab-Ili and Nurnichtnur, not to forget the few LPs that Goldstein released on his own label MG back in the 1980s, and which are treasures in my collection) – but it’s a sign of wider recognition when a composer or musician gets the attention of one of the majors. Well, Goldstein has seen releases on Wergo, but then performing the music of colleagues: John Cage and Christian Wolff. Here he is, anyway, with a precious CD, which you can feel that everyone involved has worked hard on, from layout to liner notes, not to mention the musical content! Malcolm Goldstein gets a better presentation in these liner notes, penned by Peter Garland, than ever before. Klaus Schöning, for many years the director of Studio Akustische Kunst at the WDR in Cologne, has also written a text for the booklet, and the composer and musician himself, Malcolm Goldstein, provides his notes. To put it simply: Malcolm Goldstein is, and has always been, one of the few completely original and incorruptible artists of our time, devoted to his art and its implications, no matter where it would take him. He is a good man. He is a good example for anyone, by virtue of his simple lifestyle and his natural and self-evident philosophy, which causes no harm. Living - when staying in his cabin - in a land morally defiled by sincerely evil powers and a host of demons, Goldstein represents what is good in this country, allowing for some hope. His artisanship and his artistry deeply affect and inspire. I can remember how his music hit me the first time I heard it, when Malcolm’s old friend Folke Rabe – Swedish composer, musician and radio man – played it to me, and gave me Malcolm’s address so I could write him (long before the Internet) and order his LPs. It was revolutionary for my understanding of musical expression and what it could be. What I heard on those LPs was unthinkable before the record began its 33⅓ rpm revolutions. After that first encounter, Malcolm Goldstein’s music became necessary for me, and when I began freelancing a bit at the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation in the late 1980s, I played Goldstein’s Soundings for Solo Violin in my first show, from a recording at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Conn., conducted in October 1979 and released on one of Malcolm’s own LP productions (MG 1)! Track 1. Configurations in Darkness for solo violin (1995) [10:09] This work is an improvisation on a folksong from Bosnia-Herzegovina; one of the folksongs used in the more extended ensemble work with the same name that appears on track 2 on this CD. It is a very special experience to listen with generous attention to a Goldstein performance. If you don’t simply shrug it off and close your mind, you get involved beyond your expectations. It’s hard to stay cool in face of this music and its feverish gentleness. This piece begins in a curtsey and a bow in the obscurity of physical and mental vagueness, with a melody figure that could have originated in some wall hanging above a kitchen sofa in Swedish Dalecarlia. The melody feels its way around the periphery of sentience, gradually establishing some kind of hazy identity and loose connection with the moment, wobbling in and out of here and now, tainted with the dusty squeaks of neighboring epochs and the damp climates of dark distances. Goldstein is a master of gallant harshness, of sensitive brutality, peaceful violence and violent peace, finding poetry in forlorn sound spaces, sincerity and ardor in zero sonic circumstances, under the highway overpasses of existence; amongst the rusty leftovers of our sonorous civilization. He finds a grain of sand in the world, and he plays, rubs, circles and spins this grain of sand in the world, invoking the pure power within. Goldstein is doing something else, and these sounds are by-products, sonic signs of something going on in the grains of sand in the world. Sometimes Malcolm Goldstein plays the sounds on track 1 like a filter in Photoshop called “shatter”. He sounds like the thousand sharp pieces of a broken mirror reflecting the light in a shower of blinding angles. Goldstein is a Gandhi punk rocker! Track 2. Configurations in Darkness (1995) [25:48] for ensemble. The Andromeda Galaxy is tilted across my computer screen; 300 billion worlds: some configuration in darkness, huh? I stare at those 300 billion worlds in one causal glance – that’s how heartbreakingly wild everything is, down to the last Planck length string of existence and non-existence, flickering ‘tween the Quantum Theory uncertainty gratings… and I listen in concord to Malcolm Goldstein’s ensemble music, recorded in star-sky clarity, nebulae-bright bursts from flute and bass clarinet (reminding me of Kürten sessions with Kathinka Pasveer and Suzanne Stephens…); solar flares reaching through the cello; grainy meteor fields grinding past our imaginary Star Maker vessel in the hazy fiddle friction; the trombone the voice of a lurking deity… The taste of this music is very full, like a mouthful of dark chocolate or a whole hard-boiled egg behind your teeth! The contouring is sharp, sure – non-hesitant; like the feel of a children’s book with clear, colorful illustrations, while also carrying the lustful threat of rancid, acrimonious evil and inconvenient causes… Wild! Parts of this constitute recollections of propeller bombers over the English Channel; dark trajectories bending through the lower pitches towards a 13th February vengeance in Dresden and those subsonic circumstances that taint our collective conscience, duly lamented in mournful irregularities extending from cello and a barbed-wire-through-mist violin, eventually rising into wails of karmic pain: Configurations in Darkness. The flute, however, paints elegant, red lines through thin air and lighter moods, fiddle pizzicati dot-marking an aleatoric path into more breathable sections of the future, just up ahead, a day’s mountain trek away – so swing your backpack, let your boots engage. Configurations in Darkness, the ensemble version, is a masterwork, so intricate, presenting various combinations of the instruments in a number of performance practices in a fabulous sound quality – revealing new things each time you listen. It’s one of Goldstein’s greatest hits, no doubt!
A duet of bass clarinet and trombone glares through the valleys like stray sunlight, streams gleaming down the slopes; mineral-rich water for you to drink, straight out of the glaciers. Here the music is grasping the totality of the situation; the inner and the outer view, resting in the real: dreams, thoughts, water, rocks, silhouettes of the mountains and traces of karma down the tracks of many former lives, shaping this elusive NOW, so full of elusive sensations of being. Pitch your tent in a lonely rock desert. Feel the stars pinching at night! This music is a possibility! Track 3. Ishi/timechangingspaces (1998) [20:01] (Acoustic art / radio work) The basis for this textsound work is the voice of Ishi, the sole survivor of the Indian tribe Yahi in California, recorded on wax cylinders back in 1914. Acoustic recordings on 78 rpm discs had been in use for a number of years at that time, while electric recordings with a dramatically improved sound on 78s wouldn’t appear until a few years later. Enrico Caruso was the one who opened the world for the 78s through his enormous popularity. He made his first 78 recordings at Grand Hotel in Milan on 11th April 1902, cutting ten songs, and the technique and the discs were in common use by 1914, but the wax cylinders were still utilized, especially when mobile equipment was the best alternative, which was the case, for example, when Karl Tirén of Sweden traveled Swedish Lapland, recording Sámi yoik 1913 – 1915, bringing his phonograph equipment with him, wax cylinders and all, to the Sámi winter and summer settlements. The phonograph was also Yngve Laurell’s choice when recording Swedish folk musicians – mostly fiddlers and clarinetists – in the second decade of the 20th century in Stockholm. It was a natural choice for the anthropologists at the University of California at Berkeley to record Ishi onto wax cylinders, even though the choice inevitably would have been another one a couple of years later.
“The music was created at Studio Akustische Kunst of the West German Radio, Cologne. Ishi was the sole surviving person of the Yahi, a Native American people of Northern California who were destroyed by force of white intrusion in the nineteenth century. (Reflections here on Thomas Merton’s book Ishi Means Man) In 1914 Ishi recorded many songs on the wax cylinders of that time; a fragment of a culture’s sounding sustained in the voice of its single human remnant: Song for Woman’s Dance; Foot Song Against Tiredness in Travel; Fish Song; Dancing Song of Dead People in the Other World; Flint Doctor’s Song; Deer Song (not for dancing); etc… These songs are now transformed through time and into multitudes of spaces; from the resonance of human voice (the line of song embedded as scratches within the waxen cylinders, revolving), transformed in this radio/acoustic art work, through magnetic tape electronics and transmitted out into the new time/space of radio (the world of its future), heard always as now.” A constant, repetitious hack in time, seeping back and forth through the turnstile of existential exit and entry – the flicker that holds the equilibrium that is the nature of this shadow play of us, right between here and now, ever-ending, never stopping – a continuous illusion of time past and time present: a hack in “time”, which itself is a wormhole to the far side of this NOW, which is not THEN but HERE: All Places Are Here; All Times Are Now. Goldstein is playing with our illusion of time in this wonderful piece of minimalistic sound poetry sound art. Time is just the embrace of Space. Be loved! Ishi/timechangingspaces is a kind of Marconi Poetry of layered distances, structured strands of alienation and wake dreams. Life never gets more real than in these turned-away, absentminded zero realms, where everything perfectly equals nothing. The whole universe is one long gaze into the mirror. Track 4. Ishi/”man waxati” Soundings (1988) [13:16] Goldstein calls this work a “structured improvisation/composition evolved out of […] Ishi/timechangingspaces”. “man waxati” means spring [as in well; source of water] in the Yahi language. Ishi, in the same language, means “man”. The roughness of Goldstein’s hard-pressed fiddling is smeared out across the bat-infested underworld by natural reverberation, in a guise of swarms of insects exchanging positions/messages – or are these the eventual lingering thoughts stirring inside a dead body like hair and nails keep on feeding off of the energy left in the flesh, good to use until the bodies of craftsmen, vagrants and kings are finally dissolved into the common energy bank of the world? Malcolm Goldstein uses his bow like one of the three musketeers fighting on a spiral stone staircase in a French castle, retreating some, then fiercely attacking – as the metallic sonorities of steel against steel resound across the mighty hall of political power. Sometimes I feel like the fiddler is caught in the maze of a ball of yarn, madly trying to free himself – but then I get a vision of a kitten playing lustfully with that same ball of yarn, lashing out with its sharp claws! – and indeed, this is clawy music, scratching your mind, and it’s lethal music, slashing through space-time with the resolve of a samurai sword intensely sharpened against a rotating whetstone, cutting all the crap! Yeah, right on, Malcolm! Raise your bow; clear the temple, clear the air!
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