Thomas Buckner: ”Thirty-five years ago when I began to explore solo and group improvisation, the idea was to make improvisations that sounded like compositions. I’ve evolved away from this idea gradually to the point where I want my improvisations, both solo and group, to sound (to be) unpredictable, to take me, my fellow improvisers and the audience to places we haven’t been before.”

Buckner further explains how each and every part of this music is developed independently of one another, and how the participants also worked independently all the way up to and through the cohesion in which they forged their ideas into simultaneity. The electronic processing of the vocals is developed by Tom Hamilton to ensure that no foreseen event ever takes place…

Tom Hamilton: ”…It is with great pleasure and some relief that I’ve returned (for a while) to making pieces that address essentially formal procedures. This performance uses techniques of analog electronic synthesis to structure, phrase and pace […] as well as to generate the actual sound material.”

The adventure of voice and electronics isn’t a new one – at all! Remember Stockhausen’s ”Gesang der Jünglinge” and Herbert Eimert’s ”Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama”, later joined by numerous, yes, innumerable, investigations into the voice in electronic settings and permutations. Yet, the matter is by no means closed, as that instrument – the voice – which is so close to us all, so utterly meaningful and physical, always reach new and altered expressions of the soul.

The music on this CD is indeed continuous, and the track points are provided for the convenience of the listener only. It opens on a solely electronic note; a stretch of bubbly, fast progressions, not unlike some of the galloping adventures of French madman and sound poet Henri Chopin or his colleague of electroacoustics at Studio Celia, Jean Schwarz.
The web of sounds widen as a voice – unintelligible – arrives and takes over much of the area, while other, demon-like sounds – as is from evil-hearted birds or ghastly shadowy creepy-crawlies out of our murkiest sub-conscious – circle the voice of probable human origin in a maze of audio, rising out of the spinning plastic in the laser-box.

It doesn’t take long for this sound world to reach the jungle, but it is a dream-state jungle with fairies, dragons and giant fern… You’re inside someone’s dream, or inside a flowing, swaying reminiscence of unknown ages, that hovers inside the meadow mist of late night landscapes.

This music is a peculiar mix of vocal and electronic sounds, drawing on old findings of Stockhausen as well as new inklings by Tom Hamilton and his apparatus of electric currents and binary solutions to artistic problems. I enjoy it immensely. The pure intensity of some of the passages reminds me a lot of Jean Schwarz and his high-voltage piece ”Quatre Saisons”, pushing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s texts to their limits! The vocals there were provided by the baritone Jorge Chaminé. Inside track 3 of ”jump the circle, jump the line” the electronic treatment of the voice of Thomas Buckner is almost identical to that of baritone Chaminé in the Schwarz work – probably without any such intentions from Hamilton; the effectiveness of the manipulations is reason enough to utilize them; the dream state it pulls you into, like a transparent membrane of time being lowered all around you, through which you sense long-gone occurrences and distant walks of life of distant souls. It’s eerie – but very tempting too…

Long stretches are made up of pure cave electronics, wherein the stalagmites and the stalactites reach for each other in a mineral darkness deep beneath the rock bottom… The voice that then occurs lends its vocal chords to the earth spirit itself, turning and twisting through massive layers of clay…

Sometimes rippling, pearly Buchla-like sounds, reminding me of The Silver Apples of the Moon of Morton Subotnick gush by in gleaming spirals.
On the whole, this music is enchanted, other-worldly, sub-merged and subterranean, physical in a fat clay-like sense and spiritual in a dark, demonic sense throughout; a bit scary, a bit dangerous, but, as stated before; tempting, like danger can be tempting up in the mountains on a stormy night.

An electronic mimicry of insect-life hisses and whispers past in the music, magnifying the elastic micro-worlds of unknown existences on the border of non-existence… like in “Chaos & the Emergent Mind of the Pond” by David Dunn… and it goes beyond that, into vibrating planes of subatomic jitter, inside the hypotheticalities of neutrino, passing un-altered through everything, leaving traces of passage inside the scientists’ subterranean water tanks…

Thomas Buckner’s vocal surge at times places me in a medieval Europe of the overflowing tables of Rabelais and the deep horror of the Black Death ravaging through the villages. Much of this sound world displays this medieval mix of lust and death, engulfing you in a sheer hurricane of sensuality and spirituality, of sexual pleasures and the smell of decaying corpses and the curving spaces under the domes of cathedrals. Mastery is at work in this sound art!