I got dizzy trying to read Rob Haskins’ liner notes. They’re printed in circles on the CD itself, and as you turn the goddam thing, you get… dizzy!
However, I believe this is a good way in to the music; a spell of dizziness, nausea, a loss of control…
Somewhere in the circling motion that screwed me down into the vicinity of vomiting, I saw the statement that the listener is a tourist in these number pieces, and it could well be… or perhaps I’d rather see the venture into OgreOgress’ fourth CD with Cage’s number pieces as an exercise, into the nothingness of… nothing, which, of course, is nothing but the allness of the all.

I mean that these musicians – on the instigation of the Cagean atmosphere – actually play nothing but silence, but to hear the silence you have to hear it indirectly, so to say, through sound. What you hear is a shadow of silence itself, a sound shadow. These sounds are simply the shadows of the silence in the music; a disturbance on the periphery of perception, a way of affecting silence to sound by observing it – because you can’t observe it without affecting it, bending it into a vibration that sounds; the sounds of silence.

I’m sure Fong, Krummel, Freeman and Crawford rather’d not sound at all, if they could get across by playing the silence up front, hands on, but a sounding shadow of silence is as close as you get if you want to hear the meaning of silence in a musical piece.

The real nothingness of silence is a non-something that has to disappear in the mind of the listener himself, and I think these anti-silence tries at silence serve the purpose of tuning the listener to the greater silence behind the shadows of silence that are carved with the violin, viola, bass and percussion – where the percussion serves as a director of attention to the theory of the point, the absolute singularity that really focuses nothing into a super-nothing! The string instruments rather draw attention to the other aspect of nothing; i.e. time, i.e. the now and the forever – absolutely the same thing… and the super-nothing of point and the endless now of forever come together in the expression “all places are here – all times are now” – and in the ascetic generosity of these Number Pieces.

As is understood, the Number Pieces give space and opportunity for a kind of meditation that shoots off to nowhere, into the middle of nothing – and always! This can cleanse the circumstances of the attentive and relaxed listener who can just rest on the breath and the slow unfolding of layers of existential residue that are peeled of in this music. Ignore gravity of thought! Let these approximations of silence sound and light up cerebral skies in shooting photon ejaculations! The sky is an erogenous zone! Time is a slow orgasm! The sounds of silence are the hypothetical rustling of possible worlds! The roar of nothing is the memory of something that isn’t yet.

The line and the dot of these Number Pieces are the Yin and Yang of I and Thou, of Us and It; the generous allowance of a misconception of duality in this Mono-All, this meeting place for noses and necks in curved space…

One⁴ is delivered in Glenn Freeman’s percussive language and a lot of space. The ringing sometimes mimic some early La Monte Young and Harry Bertoia atmospheres inside infinite, Louvre-like steelworks; Bethlehem Steel stretching in all directions, walls thinning into soap bubble transparency; those metallic clouds and those long pauses in passage of the clouds, those thoughtful cardiac arrests that propel beings from existence to existence, the Earth burning under their bodily vehicles.

Four comes here in all versions, and instructions for programming your player with Cage's different versions are given; one alternate 30-minute version, two 20-minute versions and also two at 10 minutes.
These are layered stretches of patience, standing waves of photographed motion, fire around ice – still days in Icelandic opposites… old blood gushing out of the tales…

This music is not un-beautiful, but I don’t think the aim is beauty. I think beauty is just a by-product in the process of catching the shades of silence – and sometimes it is impossible to avoid beauty, even though you know it is distracting and may lead you to half a year’s consumption of anti-depressants…

I begin to understand now how the cover art of the CD fits in with the music. It does, plainly! Those mountains stand around the Stuor Reaiddávággi Valley (vággi is Saami for valley) between the Nallo hut and the Sälka huts in Swedish Lapland. I recall hiking that valley across the polygon fields, tired and worn out, hoisting a heavy backpack, entering a state of hypnosis, a shaman layer of consciousness while my body vehicle trudged on; a sensation which returns to me in these versions of Four!

The laconic way of existence sometimes occurs loud and clear, bright and shiny, right before you. The other day it did, out of the blue, when an old man I didn’t know called me on the phone and said he had a stack of letters from the past that were addressed to me. After a while I understood. The man was a collector of stamps, and in a collection he’d bought somewhere, he found a lot of letters that had been mine a long time ago. I had received them when I was 13. I am now 55. I had had about forty or so pen pals at that age, having just learned English. They were from Sri Lanka, Canada, Scotland, South Korea, Mauritius, Jamaica, Japan and so forth. I had given all those letters to my stamp-collecting nephew at the close of the Sixties – and now they turned up unexpectedly. The old man brought them over so that I could have a look, and a bridge was created from myself to myself, spanning 42 years. The letters were in perfect condition, and I immediately remembered those friends of mine from way back; Delores Thompson in Jamaica, Young Pai Kim in South Korea, Angus Campbell in Scotland etcetera. I began reading the letters – and in one of them, from Jamaica, dated in the fall of 1962, Delores said:

…So those simple words, two lines in a letter from 1962, briefly touch upon a situation that had the grand potential of the Eve of Destruction for the beings sustaining their lives in this thin biosphere, against all odds!
Now – 42 years after they were written – Delores’ two-liner about the end of the world and the ingenious madness of the Masters of War – and something much bigger; the laconism of existence and its core of timelessness - emerge before me again, the same day that I receive this OgreOgress CD with the elusive imprints of the shadows of silence in its surface, brought to life by a laser light and a revolving motion and the raging river of electrons… and these seemingly disparate and completely separated occurrences merge in my perception of life into a whole that all moves in the same direction, in the same vulnerable elasticity of flow; the silent exclamation of Life as it looks itself in the eyes and tries to find a plausible question…

John Cage’s music is a good question, and sometimes I sense that there is an answer in there too, that not even Cage was aware of, a dormant answer that will formulate itself according to the state of hearing of recipient beings in an unforeseeable future… I feel, sometimes, that I’m close to something in the relentless shade of the silence on Twenty-Nine, but the notion is elusive like the fragrance of dreams when you wake – and I let this body rest in the caress of planetary-provided gravity, at this moment immersed in colored shades of silence from John Cage’s Number Pieces as interpreted by Christina Fong, Karen Krummel, Glenn Freeman and Michael Crawford…