It’s windy out there, I’ve had my share of strong coffee – and Malcolm is playing a captured moment on a compact disc revolving in a bleak laser light! I’ve burnt some incense to get in the mood, and here I am, fully perceptive to the sharp undertakings of Mr. Goldstein and his wonder violin.

This CD was recorded live at Dacapo in Bremen, Germany in 1994, and Goldstein is a truly live artist. Live is the ultimate recording process when it comes to Goldstein. I don’t think many cuts were made in his studio recordings either, so possibly they could also be considered live.

First track here is ”Ishi >man waxati< soundings”. ”Soundings” is a concept widely used by Goldstein, and it’s just an indication that the piece is an improvisation. I suspect that Goldstein sometimes works out of a set of prerequisites or postulations, much like an Indian musician works in different raga forms, or like Karlheinz Stockhausen applies his ”Momente”. Within the framework set by the artist many variations can occur, as it is with for example Stockhausen’s piece ”Momente”, where the conductor picks the different ”Momente” and the possible ”inserts”, to turn each performance into a variation based on the rules that are prescribed. However, Goldstein maintains that there actually is no structural basis for his improvisations. He describes his soundings like this: ”Soundings: plumbing the depths of sound in/of me. All sounds. Touch releasing things into motion; gesture realized / resonances of texture becoming song. (Music: the process of living, sounding.) Improvisations, my violin playing… an overflowing of myself in space. Sound as a physical reality, touching upon the ears of the body; (>upon the string, within the bow… breathing<)… reverberations within the skull becoming a changing landscape – a new music.”

Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahi people of northern California. His name, Ishi, means ”man” or ”person”, and ”man waxati” represents ”spring”, ”source of water”. This violin piece is a development out of a radio play by Goldstein from 1988 at WDR in Cologne and their Studio for Acoustic Art (Studio Akustische Kunst).

I also have another version of ”Ishi >man waxati< soundings” on a private CD, recorded at Fylkingen in Stockholm in 1991. It sure is interesting to be able to compare different performances of the same work by Goldstein. The performance of ”Ishi >man waxati< soundings” at Fylkingen is much shorter than the version we hear on the Dacapo CD. The Fylkingen version is 12:10, while the Dacapo version is 21:14. I suppose time in a measured sense has no importance in this context, just providing a space for the sound to ring through.

It’s the same old pleasure to dwell inside the sounding sounds of Goldstein’s mind, as projected on your tympanic membranes. There is often an introverted or meditative quality to the shrills and scrapings of Malcolm’s bow, but his music can at times be like sand blown into your eyes by an Arizona sand storm that puts the highway traffic outside Phoenix to a sudden halt. Yeah, sometimes Goldstein rubs the early morning breadcrumbs that you forgot on the breakfast table in your afternoon after-work-eyes… Beauty does in no way have to be beautiful, and this is oftentimes the case with Goldstein.

Track 2 is ”Gentle rain preceding mushrooms (in memoriam John Cage)”. It was written before and after Cage’s death on August 12th 1992. In a dated inscription in a corner of the score Goldstein wrote, the day before Cage’s death: ”Death rattle of wings / dragonfly at my doorstep (Vermont Aug. 11th 1992)”.
The piece – as the title also would suggest – emerges very softly and cautiously in a slowly moving motion of the bow, inching it’s way like a snail across wet undergrowth. It is a worthy homage to Goldstein’s friend, the mushroom hunter. After the slow and careful beginning sudden little thuds of the bow over the strings convey to me the feeling of water drops falling off the fern in the wooded meadow, as thrushes who like the rain add their songs to the sparse fabric of sound – in complete transparency. Goldstein now joins in with his characteristic voice, and you can actually feel yourself materialize in the meadow, in a forest that of course is – enchanted! Seldom – if ever! - have I heard a piece of music of any kind that so strongly suggests the Enchanted Forest (Maybe some electroacoustic pieces by Jacques Lejeune come close). Goldstein is an elf in this forest, sitting over on a tree stub, his damp dragon fly wings reflecting the forest light that seeps down from the overcast sky. The spirits are at ease in this forest, and humans are far off in a distant urbanity, where the factory smokestacks stand like endless stabs along the horizons. John Cage was an elf too, don’t you see!

Track 3 is ”Qernerâq; our breath as bones” – a typically Goldsteinesque title!
This is a piece for violin and voice. Goldstein uses fragments of words from a song-poem by an Inuit; Padloq, transcribed by Knud Rasmussen around 1920. Goldstein explains in the booklet that it is a healing song to be sung in times of mortal danger:

Goldstein also says that his performance of this piece is ”a song offering for peace in these times”.

Some of the clearest minuscule violin cuts I’ve heard Goldstein pour out, appear here, accompanying and accentuating his vocal invocations. Then he sort of sketches his visions with a lead pencil or a piece of carbon on the white and gray Inuit horizon, where ancient ominous signs dance across the infinite expanses. He draws a wide circle around himself on the ice, in a constant frantic and very decided revolution, invoking whatever powers willing to assist in a dire moment – perhaps a dire moment personally, perhaps a generally dire moment for humanity, and the effort of the shaman may be our last hope, when man’s technical religion leaves him soulless and wanting.

The last entry on this indispensable – but maybe hard to get? – CD from Malcolm Goldstein on Dacapo is called “Soundings for Violin Solo 1994”, just indicating a certain place in the space-time continuum where/when these delicate maneuvers of the bow across the violin strings measured the flow, the continuing Heraklit flow. It’s a crystalline piece with many sharp edges that Goldstein maneuvers around, at times traversing impossible slopes of ice way up in the Himalayas, in treacherous K2 climbs.

We are happy to have a guy like Malcolm Goldstein around! There’s only one of him!"