Holy medallion! This is one of the most far out (if you can excuse my old 1960s wording…) stuff I’ve heard since I was a young caballero, hitting the old hippie trail from Western Europe to Kathmandu in Nepal in an old Ford Cortina, picking up Japanese hitch-hikers Kozo & Yozi in pre-war Iraqi Basra, burning incense all over the place, when I wasn't at home in Sweden in between trips, working double at the psychiatric clinic and the steelworks. This Pogus CD made me burn some incense again, some Satya Sai Babab Nag Champa Agarbatti from India, with this warning on the package: “Insist for this label to avoid imitation!”. Holy smoke! This could be said for Pogus Productions too! They’re one of a kind company, which they’re exclusive output surely shows. I suppose these ventures would be impossible without the worldwide market that the Internet provides. I mean, globally there are enough lunatics and sound aficionados to sell these wonderful CDs to!

Being a Scandinavian of old I immediately associate the buzzing sound of the first piece on this CD to an old Bronze Age instrument. It was just a small stone or piece of bone attached to a string, that bronze-agers flung in a circle to cause this sound. It’s called a whiner – and whine it does.
This first piece is simply called “Tabla & Buss Chime”. I like this way of naming tunes. It reminds me of Morton Feldman, who called his pieces stuff like “Piano”, “Piano & String Quartet”, “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” and so forth. Robert Rutman has manufactured many of his instruments, and on this CD a few of them are put to use. The manufacturing of instruments puts Rutman in an exclusive spot together with the likes of Harry Partch, Alvin Lucier and Harry Bertoia.

Four out of the five pieces here were recorded live in Winchester, Mass., in 1989, while the last piece was recorded in Berlin, live too. The sound is without flaws, close and intense, and I find myself turning up the volume to make the whole room vibrate, while my incense keeps on burning.
“Tabla & Buss Chime” is an intense, very rhythmic havoc through the soundspace, with the tabla punctuating the whining of the buss chime, in a smoking dervish dance across the terrain. It’s quite impossible to keep hands and feet in place during a sit-through, believe you me!

Track 2 – “Steel Cello & Bow Chime” – is quite a different matter. Long, extended sounds seep through the space-time continuum, like a sorrowful requiem, in fact reminding me a little of the soundworld of Gavin Bryars in for example “After the Requiem” (ECM 1424) and “The Sinking of the Titanic” (TWI 922-2). These feel like underwater sounds, of a foreboding sort, with an inherent warning of sorts.

Track 3 – “Chant, Bow Chime and Horn” – keeps me on my hippie trail eastwards. Robert Rutman’s deep chanting is straight out of the “Sangwa Düpa” of Tibet, even with accompanying sounds that could as well have come from a three meter long Tibetan Trumps Dungchen, used for liturgical ends.

Track 4 – “ Three Bow Chimes” – keep the extended sounds stretching, but this time with a different timbre. The first Monday of every third month in Sweden, the war-and-catastrophe alarms are tested. The signal – a long, penetrating signal, repeated with pauses – is blasted from rooftops and other high places around the neighborhood all over the country. At one time a few years ago the signal got jammed, and didn’t stop. It kept on for hours! I took the opportunity, grabbed a tape recorder and biked through the area, recording the horrific signals, while the sound changed as I got closer to some of the alarms, and more distant to others and so on. Later I mixed these signals together, playing them at different pitches, and this track – “Three Bow Chimes” – gets pretty close to my alarm recording at times. It’s a bit ghastly. Since musical associations always pop up in my mind I might as well mention Alvin Curran and his great project “Maritime Rites”, a ten-part series of environmental concerts for radio, featuring the maritime sounds of the eastern seaboard of the United States, composed by Curran, with part-takers like Steve Lacy, Pauline Oliveros, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage etcetera, which was released on a couple of cassettes by the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. Robert Rutman’s “Three Bow Chimes” at times get into soundworlds similar to what you can hear on “Maritime Rites”. I’m impressed by the variety of sounds these guys accomplish on these homemade instruments.

Track 5 – “Song of the Steel Cello” – wasn’t recorded with the rest of the pieces, but is quite similar in expression and sound to track 2 – 4, but more explicit, more inwardly ambitious. This is the longest of the tracks, just over twenty minutes, and starts of with what seems to be a sarangi, but of course it is the homemade steel cello. The association here is to the Romanian avant-garde and the spectral music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Horatiu Radulescu, as well as to India and the sarangi of Pandit Ram Narayan. This is incense burning music too - introspectal stuff to the core - and though it takes getting used to screeches and dissonances to enjoy this, that shouldn’t be any problem to anybody used to either Dumitrescu or Narayan, or for that matter to anybody who ever got in ear-shot of the Pogus label. Highly recommendable to sound adventurers and introspectors, as well as to old hippie trail Indiafarers like myself.