A good hour of piece with yourself. A good hour’s outtake for far away eyes, seemingly absentmindedly locked in the horizon…

Diaz-Infante: “Tepeu is a Mayan god: the Governor, one who brings order to the universe. I think of my creative process as bringing order out of chaos”.

These free improvisations are airy structures climbing like spider legs across the terrain of an uncharted score of the gods.
“As above, so below” calms and soothes, moves the high grass to the side in wide, stroking gestures, in an innocence and honesty that accepts the conditions of life in a karmic assurance of elevation up through the existences…
Notes are sparse, finding their way ahead or to the side – sometimes even in directions arching backwards into their own auditory prints – in gentle proceedings, a little uneven, sometimes apparent in small accumulations of timbres, sometimes in lone, solidly contoured bodies of tone. You feel safe, yet curious… and aloof.

“Thesis” starts and continues in the vein of a Terry-Rileyish “New Albion Chorale” atmosphere, with glimmering, glistening spiralings out of the grand keyboard of the piano, at times digging down in blue-note blues trajectories, but always returning to the windswept expanses of Western prairies with snow-covered mountain peaks at the sawtooth horizon, where thoughts and dreams can roam freely, on soaring gushes of fresh oxygen.

“Tepeu” is the weightiest of the improvisations, with its longer duration. Diaz-Infante expresses that “Tepeu” is a structured improvisation, as opposed to the free improvisations of the other pieces.
My immediate and initial feeling in connection with “Tepeu” belongs in the music of Claude Debussy and some really contemplative and almost sly undertakings of composers early in the 20th century. The music is sparse, transparent, thinned out, yet tangible and sort of wooden, as if you could touch the body of the composition, like you would an old wooden toy horse that had become tarnished and discolored by age and many generations of tiny hands… and maybe this feeling of something reclaimed from the custody of Time has to do with the name of this god – Tepeu – being proclaimed – invoked - out of the cultural layers of the Mayas.

You have a lot of good time inside this composition to gaze out through the lattice of the tones, to whatever dreamy vision your inner self is transposed by Ernesto Diaz-Infante’s light, bleak and estranged fingerings through this music, which brings across the impression that the performer is disconnected, uplifted in some higher layer of existence, with the keyboard magically connected directly to the electric impulses of his far away visions…
Diaz-Infante achieves the finest tone of expression of late colleague Morton Feldman without indulging in any of Feldman’s compositional methods, through just having his musical impulses of the moment meander out of his creative aura into the body of the instrument, from where these coded messages from within rise in spectral beauty…

“Antithesis” is the first fast-moving track on the CD, with bluesy staccato rhythms and densely packed stacks of tones, falling out downwind in a domino effect music with bluesy signatures. Again I feel the connection to Terry Riley and some of the tracks of his state of the art work “Harp of New Albion”. This is great new art music from big sky deliberations, with an inherent flavor of some of the more popular musical genres of smoky clubs on the respective seaboards of America. Diaz-Infante hammers away in great precision, as the skilled artisan he is; a quality extra obvious when he lets lose and simply lets his intuition do the job.
I suppose “Antithesis” is the antithesis of “Thesis”, in a good old Hegelian way, which would characterize the next piece – “Synthesis” – as the subsequent Hegelian synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, making the synthesis another thesis, which in turn would be opposed by another antithesis and so forth…
“Synthesis” trickles like melting water from a snowy roof a day in March in the Northern Hemisphere, as the sunlight is getting gradually warmer, actually affecting the snow cover on the southern slopes, but not yet reaching winter where it ducks away in obscure and shadowy hideouts of deep forests…

There is no real need for hurry inside this music, but it moves along nicely anyway, the way life passes day by day with no special object other than letting time flow through our anatomies or letting our bodies – temporary expressions of cosmic forces (the breath of God) – sail and soar through the time-space continuum…
I sit still and let Diaz-Infante’s relaxed but concentrated pianistic expressions cleanse my mind of thoughts and other debris…

“What has been, will be again” is the wonderful title of Diaz-Infante’s last improvisation on this great release from Pax Recordings. I keep the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bhagavad-Gita by my bed, reading a few pages each night before going to sleep, so I’m accustomed to that thought, or should I say that notion… of an ever-present life force, just manifesting itself in all these innumerable mortal shapes and forms, shifting in and out of view, never gone, indestructible… and so Diaz-Infante’s conclusion points ahead through these meandering, sweeping, caressing chords of the piano, through swaying curtains of overtones and colorful timbres into lofty chambers of space and time, and the light of enlightenment reflects off of each droplet of sound…