Jeff Gburek (b.1963) comes sliding into my listening experience on a preview of a CD soon to be released on the Nurnichtnur label in Germany. Even though I might be a bit jaded and inconsiderate due to excessive listening to new audio projects, I must say that this Gburek CD inspires me a lot; even surprises me at times!
In fact, at first I didn’t understand much. I knew or thought I knew - that this was supposed to be a guitarist CD; kind of a solo venture. Yet the sounds and the concepts were so varied and smoothly disjointed; beautifully arbitrary… that I just couldn’t merge with the inner picture of a lone guitarist… I dug a bit deeper and got the guy online, or almost online, in a series of email exchanges.

Jeff Gburek immediately let me know that it was the visions or atmospheres that this music might give rise to in a listener’s mind that interested him, and not a lengthy discussion about methods or machinery, but my stubbornness and sincere will to understand some more softened this artistic stonewalling attitude. This is how Gburek explains his methods, email wise:

Even though I agree with Gburek’s view that it is the atmospheres inside the hall of mirrors of the mind that are truly intriguing, I, for one, also enjoy this part above, when he is talking about his methods. To me it’s like poetry to hear about rewired amps and small motors on the guitar! It’s innovative, creative, a workshop of artistry – and I sense a long American will-do tradition from Harry Partch, Robert Erickson and John Cage; the very best of the crew-cut, lumber jacket, Red Wing boots ingenuity, which can take you by the outer planets on Voyager or inside the sonic imagery of Jeff Gburek; those are just different branches of the same stubborn and relentless curiosity! In that sense Jeff Gburek’s music is sounding out of the true American Spirit, which we can easily forget these days, when it’s all but blurred and erased by spiritless political constipation. Let’s not forget that true American spirit of discovery! It is revealed brightly and clearly inside Jeff Gburek’s sounds, so let it shine!

In a first draft of the coming release notes for this CD which may, or may not, be called Energariums, these are some of the things that Gburek says:

Later he continues:

Some biographical background will be interesting for anyone interested enough to read this far, so I’ll simply quote from the Djalma website (www.djalma.com), since the essence is already expressed very well there, just making it a presumptuous act of me to try and rearrange the info to make it look like mine…:

In the Djalma setting Gburek collaborates with the dancer Ephia. I believe her spirit has influenced Gburek’s musicianship very much, as he has influenced her, so her inclusion here is logical. Again a quote from the Djalma site:

On the Djalma site her involvement with Gburek, and their joint efforts, are described like this:

Well, all this information surely indicates that this music is coming out of a world of thought-forms of much depth and width, from a person who has traveled the spiritual spheres that are so much more real in their visionary aspects than the meaty materializations in the firm grip of the gravity of this place of matter, nicht wahr? I may as well quote myself in this context, in a saying of mine, which dawned on me long before I started to study Tibetan Buddhism:

“That which isn’t eternal isn’t very real”.

Another one of those sayings of mine that I have come to like more and more over the years, even keeping it as the regular signature of my emails, is:

“All places are here! All times are now!”

There is a spiritual insight in those sayings that I was not at all consciously aware of when I jotted them down many years ago, but their intuitive wisdom has dawned on me afterwards. I feel that there is a similar hidden clarity in Jeff Gburek’s music, and in the breath of Ephia, which permeates it. All these original quirks of machinery and sound tools finally click over into another quality of existence, which, like all true things, is a spiritual quality; a realm of reality in this material world of unreality. Thanks for clearing the tables, Mr. Gburek! – or like Bob Dylan once suggested: “Let’s overturn these tables; disconnect these cables!” [“Senor” from “Street Legal” (1978), which I heard a lot while swimming laps at SMU – Southern Methodist University – in Dallas, Texas, where I had come biking on an orange 10-speed Crescent from New York, heading for the Western skies, only to get caught in marriage, stopping me dead in my tracks, country music on KRLD and a 1968 Chevrolet Bel Air, hot nights on Grassmere Lane].

Gburek explains that track 1 and 2 – Energarium I and Energarium II – were conceived in the atmosphere of the imminence of war, just before Iraq was attacked in 2003.

Energarium I comes seeping in a thin, long stretch of asphalt or desert miragery, a dawning awareness inside a bardo journey, when the core aim is to realize the reflection of self in the radiance of light an the timbres of sounds, or rather to realize self as mind as the causing agent for all these bardo images… and death is just a misunderstanding, a misconception by the Western world…
The initial, slowly evolving soundings appear in a parable of gradually seeping light across the horizon of consciousness, as brain activity picks up, igniting nerve-path thoroughfares in the cerebral cortex, illuminating the skull in a pulsating sense of cause, a sense of direction through the unfathomable Valley of the Shadow of Death and Life which everyone enters at the moment of physical birth, in this relentless wheel of existence… and the body finds itself flat on its back in the firm grip of planetary gravity, which, according to Albert Einstein, is nothing but… curving time… [explained so that even the layman almost… understands it, in Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for The Ultimate Theory (ISBN 91-7643-896-1)].
The crackling of shortwave communicative static beyond the horizon of decipherable events reminds me of clear winter nights in my Scandinavian youth, when consciousness and universe opened around me at the speed of life, foreign messages bouncing off atmospheric inversion layers, reaching my room on the Jogersta farm as the Milky Way arched across my nocturnal, huddling existence by the receiver, ears thirsty for voices from distant lands, and I had pictures of John Glenn, John Kennedy and Elvis Presley on my wall… and a stack of letters about a new discovery – the Beatles – on the table, ready to be mailed out to my pen pals in Mauritius!

It is still a mystery to me – even after all the explanation above – how Jeff Gburek can wring this timbral richness out of his acoustic-electric guitar, even with small motors and quirky dexterity taken into account. He has an extremely fine-tuned feel for what works, as he walks “the fragility of line”, to talk in the words of violinist and enfant terrible Malcolm Goldstein. Gburek’s music is barbed wire through the mist of fall, or thunderclaps through suffocating humidity; it evolves like magic out of the benign gesture of a magician, that guitar laid out in front of him on the table…

I hear thin, winding, bending sounds rising through the timbres, moving like seaweed, coming across like shrouded messages from inside matter, from mineral worlds of weak and strong forces, inching their way out into the open through Gburek’s guitar that lies there like an alien to be dissected in a secret hangar on a secret 1940s’ air base in a western U.S. desert…
The bulging properties of some of this audio refer right back to Theremins and other early electronic devices. Yet again I feel like riding a wave of gravity through matter, all kinds of atomic debris sticking to my shirt, stardust in my beard…

Reminiscences of early violinists appear from a distance, behind the fly-prickled window of time, in shadowy figures on the verge of memory: Eugène Ysaÿe, Jascha Heifetz, Bronislaw Huberman; the talcum powder, the bows, the strings, the purple density of heavy curtains – show-off pizzicatos.
Jeff Gburek has no problems merging that vision of early elegance with the dusty air and acrid smell of iron smoke of a 1960s’ workshop in some steel works at the Baltic Sea, the squeaking and whining of hard tools working with hard steel, the intense light from welding sets casting grotesque shadows in sudden dark patterns up brick walls… as myriads of silver-fish – secret nocturnal armies at ground level - well out into the moonlight from the warmth of piles of dross outside the huge buildings, at the end of the railway track, down by the sea.

Vibrating, percussive, sounds of a certain crystal brilliance fan out from the center of contact between a small motor (?) and the body of the guitar, as rewired amps produce a comfortable hum with a buoyancy equaling that of the Dead Sea…

A John Cage amassment of small paper sounds build a huge pile of crumpled newspapers all over the breakfast table, as yet another day haunts the human laborers in their joyless bodies, crumbs of bread falling on the floor, left indefinitely… but as the crumpling gets denser and more intense, it moves over into a pitch quality, reminiscent of falling rain; a feeling which is amplified by the somewhat disguised sounds of trucks passing and someone working with a pneumatic drill. I have no way of knowing if these instances are real live recordings of trucks and drills, appearing in a rewiring haze, or if they’re simply auditory analogies induced by the inherent character of the sounds.

Track 2, Energarium II, opens with tiny footprints in the water someone spilled on the oilcloth on the kitchen table; small sounds making their imprints between sugar bowl and coffee cups, around the crystal vase with immortelles, dodging the absentminded gazes of early morning folks. An invisible creature from Nowhereland passes the breakfast on its way between dimensions…
A hum, at first disturbing, have you reach for the cables connecting your equipment to try and find what’s wrong, but its only Gburek’s wiring. Someone moves his fingers around in a box of springs and screws, fishing for something that he doesn’t find, and a feeling of a lot of things in motion in some kind of workshop is making itself known. A few deep rumbling, smooth explosions well out, seismically, as rotating cogwheels set bigger gear in accelerating movement. Humming from huge generators place me right back in a murky nocturnal corner in the rolling-mill of the steelworks of Oxelösund at the Baltic, some Jehovah’s Witnesses’ night back in 1975, when I was laboring with sheet-metal grinding while thinking intensely about Jehovah and the 144 000 of his government, studying fiercely with the Witnesses, without, though, taking the final leap into the organization. (I still have the books) I wrote the word GOD with white chalk in meter-high letters here and there across the dirty brick walls, and on my helmet I had written Baader-Meinhof! I was a confused and determined young man!

Jeff Gburek opens all these atmospheres for me, wormholes into various parts of my life. Exciting; art at its best, throwing you around like a rag doll through your circumstances!

In connection with track 3 – Oum Kas’r, Mother of All Ports – Gburek talks about an “outrage over an action that daily becomes less decipherable in terms of its alleged justifications and more revealed for the repugnant motivations that will doubtless shame us all for years to come”.
A sweeping, cold, gushing breath chills you at the outset of this piece, as a voice, or rather a body, exhales repugnantly, much in the vein of French sound poet Henri Chopin, famous for sticking his microphone into his oral cavity, immersing it with saliva and intestinal audio! Eventually the withheld wheezing of this oral gust breaks through some kind of barrier, when the sound changes in the same way your perception changes when you quickly pull up your head from a bucket full of water! Suddenly you’re dead center in Poltergeist, in front of the flickering TV screen, the whining voice reaching for you out of an evil dimension, a slimy realm…
The sound really gets scary here, tormenting, directly from the underworld, demons swarming you like trees along a country road as you drive fast through the night, sweating with fear. Tinkling guitar sounds as well as more Henri Chopin throatings mix in with harsh fuzz box 1960s’ guitarisms, Hendrix in the rain at Woodstock, slaughtering Star Spangled Banner into shreds of nationalism… and somebody gets punched in the stomach as Tuvinian throat singers praise horses…
Truly, I’ve never heard anything quite like this beautifully insane bit! This shit knocks me out!

Gburek about track 4: “Vitrines is a composition for two prepared guitars and object sets, one left channel and one right, recorded at different times. They can display similarity or difference, and the dialogue between them. This is a very deliberately quiet series of microscopic musical events.”

In a stereophonic maximality, reminiscent of early electronic music by Gottfried Michael Koenig and Konrad Boehmer, Vitrines tampers with bits and pieces of unidentified sounding objects, that Gburek perhaps found the same way J.M.G. Le Clézio found objects along a short stretch of street in a southern French town, writing a whole novel on that material. This is the first piece on this CD with some evidence of artistic influences in Jeff Gburek’s sound art – but it’s the very best of influences; the early European pioneers from the electronic music studio at WDR; Westdeutsche Rundfunk; the studio that Stockhausen headed for quite a while.
Abrupt, sudden bits of sonic events are interspersed with long silences, out of which other rough, conflicting, grinding sounds of friction arise, bouncing into each other or passing each other in hits-and-runs and near-fatalities. Other times these very material sounds of wood and metal and harsh friction bring on a kind of peace, your elbows on the table, your head in your hands, your money in the bank, your ass in stir… You name it; we like it!
All of a sudden clearly identifiable guitar string sounds come on like real notes, surprising the wits out of me, if ever I were in possession of them. At one time plucked strings appear at left and stroked strings at right. This sometimes get conversational, at a basic, sturdy, grainy atom jitter level, matter to matter, wood to steel, steel to rubber, rubber to tall glasses filled with clear fluids…
An unforeseen conclusion emerges in the most magnificent elves’ bell tingling towards the end of Vitrines, over a delicate, gleaming surface of little, metallic bumps, the light reflecting in myriads of little angles… and it brings on thoughts of Shivkumar Sharma and his santoor, or Sune Karlsson and his notorious Danderyd knitting needles! Delicious sounds!
This gets more violently percussive, closely miked, and I start to drift into a Hungarian/Romanian Gypsy cimbalom realm, or even into the close proximity of an old Swedish dulcimer. The ring gets more invasive, more urgent.

Gburek notes, on track 5: “Detail was a small part of a lost whole which is now a whole which begs us to see ever smaller parts”.

The piece is less than a minute long, a percussive bagatelle, nourishing kindergarten funny guys and rubber ducks with rhythmic, squeaking exclamations, or perhaps it’s an homage to John Cage and his bird whistles and toy pianos! It gets so close to down-home naturalism after a while that I can almost sense small open water surfaces between clumps of reeds, the hunter sitting with his shotgun across his knees, smoking his pipe, reaching for his thermos flask, and it’s an early morn in the fall, thin veils of mist drifting across the waters further out, dissolving as the gusts of wind rise across the bay.

The next three pieces – Improv 1, 2 and 3 – “use traditional guitar held against the body techniques.” Huh?

Improv 1 bulges and sways, staggering on ahead, again, at first, in a feeling of fishing rods and thermoses in the mist, but I start to realize what Gburek means with his laconic introduction, because it all sounds more like the avant-garde, post-modern, pre-bardo guitarisms that we are aware of since a few years, in music from, for example, Ernesto Diaz-Infante; a logic evolution of Les Paul, really! Yeah, it’s true!

Improv 2 gets even deeper into the Les Paul lineage, with smooth, watery nausea at the perimeter of the audio; don’t look down, have a glass of water and that kind of guitar picking, you know – but in a hall of mirrors, the twangs and bends flying around the premises like long necklaces of DNA…

Improv 3 again, has that feel of the lonely picker up there on stage, all alone in the circle of light, sitting on his stool, leaning forward, letting his musical thoughts wander, while the audience – those sound parasites, those sonic vultures! – sit back in the darkness of the hall and sort of eavesdrop on the precious thoughts of the genius, who himself despises them, and they know it and get some kind of kinky pleasure from it…

The last piece is track 9; Afghanopsis. Gburek says that it’s “an improvisation, which incorporates themes from a few Middle Eastern maqamat”.

It’s a pretty short piece, unlike anything else on this CD, since you actually hear melody, traditional melody in traditional Mid East and Constantinople style, and I remind myself to get out some records with Marko Melkon, Udi Yorgo Bacanos, Tanburi Cemil Bey, Rita Abadzi and Roza Eskenazi after hearing Jeff Gburek out – and once again Mr. Gburek has surprised me, and set me off in an unexpected direction, towards that section of my collections where I keep the Mid-Eastern stuff, the Ottoman stuff, the rembetica stuff!
Of course, Gburek does something to this tradition, but in a very beautiful way, in a shadow play of figures and figurines; a modal reflectivity of sincere respect and devotion.