It starts with a rumble and ends… no, not with a whimper, but with a rumble…
This is Al Margolis and his clarinet, severely manipulated into a drawn-out drone of mighty proportions. It’s a British bomber crossing the Channel during the last days of the Second World War, in a foggy and dark night, and the existences down on the surface, in the surface, among the buildings (Dresden?) become aware of the sound of Death, the sound of calculated revenge, and they fall away into the firestorms, with no air to breath…

Or it can be a person – myself? - lying flat on his back in his bed in Scandinavia, with the blanket pulled up under his chin, legs stretched out, listening to a sound from an airplane headed due north, traveling high above disguised topographies in the night, carrying its dressed-up load of humans in the lit-up tube through the atmosphere; the sound of the engines finding its way down through a crack in the skies, like a spill-over from another universe, another world with another set of rules… and the rumble reaches my eardrums, making them vibrate in time with the down-reaching rumble, transmitting an ominous feeling… and the aircraft’s relation to me is that of the forest wanderer to the mycelium under the moss; that kind of indifference scares me…

Al Margolis has recorded himself playing the clarinet on four separate tracks, then bounced the sound back and forth between the four track, an eight track and a two track, while he also slowed down and sped up the tracks, filling the end result with low rumbles and traces of high overtones, in a mighty forward-moving entity, in a dark, scary sequence, as if the final iron, or the final frying pan, slowly moves in over the horizon like an alien spaceship of unheard of proportions, casting its giant shadow over the landscape like a solar eclipse that comes to stay, intent on flattening any disturbance on the face of the earth, moving in slowly but surely, taking its time, knowing it will fulfill its mission in its good time, and there is nowhere to hide…

Did you ever hear Folke Rabe’s “What??” on Dexter's Cigar in its slow version? This is related to that, but darker, more frightening. Did you also hear Pierre Henry’s “Le Livre des Morts Égyptien” (The Egyptian Death Book) on the Mantra label? Rabe’s piece is electronically generated, whereas Henry’s piece is built on concrete sounds (from a piano). Henry’s piece is scary too, and maybe almost as scary as this Margolis piece. It’s a fascinating experience to spin this Margolis CD through the laser box, giving yourself a good scare, or at least a Tarkovskij-like feeling of something unavoidable, like the passage of time or the certainty of death.