The 4-page booklet contains this slab of text by Jay Noya for track 3 of CD 1; “The Railway Station Fire”:

It is hard to know what to expect from If, Bwana; this kind of elusive, tangible, elastic name, behind which Mr. Al Margolis for sure dwells, but which also may announce other people in different constellations, like on this issue. This perplexity and confusion as to the true content of If, Bwana delights me, makes me lighter at heart and more carefree as I listen. I suppose If, Bwana is simply a way for Al Margolis to do what ever he wishes, musically, and though I’d not characterize his endeavors as Fluxus per se, this make-shift sign saying If, Bwana has Fluxus properties as I see it stick up out of the flow of contemporary art, gushing down the streets and avenues of modern America!

It is a nice initiative to issue a double-CD with the art of sound. We’ve seen this from our French friends (François Bayle, Marc Favre, Pierre Henry and others), who aren’t bashful about poetic sound sensualism – and here we are with a good American double!

“Furry” begins in a tingly, humorous elf-at-the-brook soundscape, a little elf ringing his tingling bell of silver in the shade of swaying leafy crowns of summer, as his elf friends repeat their same sound of approving amazement, nodding and almost – but not quite – burping!
The sound gets denser as it progresses, but no less enchanted. Silvery, metallic bursts or tinglings continue, and there is a clear sense of motion, be it in the realm of time or in the realm of physical kinetics. Rougher, scraping sounds add some spice, and minor incisions of tilted planes of reflecting audio have the light of sound thud back and forth. Towards the end a heavily permuted voice is drenched through the web, as if moist moss was raising its long, winding opinion from the depths of the forest floor. The piece seeps out in a fairytale reverberation, and the feeling of this silvery forest of tales lingers on long after the music stops.

“Satined Farms Far Piano” is next. It starts at a crazed speed, several layers of repetitious danger at different velocities unfolding a jagged chain along the topography of sound, and you can almost see levers moving, or perhaps the different hands of a clock moving around the clock-face at outer-space dream-warp precipitousness – but there is order to it, the order of machine-scapes, of factory-line fascism! Yessir! Other repetitious ingredients are introduced and readily accepted into the calamity of the force, and pretty soon it appears like a more polished, up-to-date hommage to old audio sage Rune Lindblad, who sometimes got involved in looping tapes at different speeds, curving and bending into an insane and finally totally alien sound world.
This piece by If, Bwana pries open the mental essence of a midnight watchmaker’s shop, and the clocks and watches never stop, their sounds (which you can hear if you put a wristwatch to your ear) never cease: like life indestructible (from life to life to life) moving along, jumping the crevasses and voids of time-space, sharpening the tools of sound and time until they’re razor-sharp – and like in good minimalism you sooner or later get treated to illusionary vibrancies, illusionary strands of sound, which really exist only as hallucinatory mirages of sound between actual sounds, and they work like the dancing glares of khoomei singing, shining way up above the basic timbre, and it is beautiful, shimmering, summer day hypnotic!
However, with eight minutes to go the manic character opens up into a wondrous vocal and drip-dropping soundscape of caves and deep crevasses of your mind or a northern glacier, and I think maybe what we hear is a thought which has got stuck in a glacier after having strayed the Lapland winter expanses too long all by itself – and if this wasn’t If, Bwana, it could have been Björk in a further evolution of her latest album “Vespertine”, where these ice-licking tongues and tickling, tingling forced thoughts wouldn’t be out of place; glaciers, crevasses, dripping water and sunlight seeping down through the ages. If, Bwana delivers a sensual touch of fingertips across your forehead; fingertips wetted with the melting water of a glacier…

“The Railway Station Fire” is a completely different story. The text quoted in its entirety above is duly recited by Adam Klein inside a sound space that could be a hallucination or a dreamlike resemblance of a 1970’s shipyard in Finland, repetitious spurts of electrical discharges mixed with ingle jangle metallic frictions of a Dumitrescu character. Klein sing-talks, talk-sings the text, and deep inside the giant shipyard – perhaps in the hull of an ocean liner being constructed or de-constructed, shadowy fragments of voices are heard, lamenting or whispering – and this piece is one of those truly original works of art, which are something completely genuine unto themselves. I’m really happy to add this original work to the ones already encompassed by my frames of reference! There is something awe-strikingly fateful about this piece, as if it portrays the uncanny determinism of the human character or the sad and necessary falling-forward of the human situation. The voices inside the shipyard web of sounds start sounding like a mumbling crowd, perhaps at the Wailing Wall or at a funeral in the refugee camp of Jenin in Palestine after the horror laid down on civilians by Israeli cruelty, taught to them by the Nazis some decades before. Another analogy links me up to Alvin Curran’s magnificent sound-text composition “For Julian”, in which Curran in fact really does play back the sounds of people at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, as the foghorns at the Portland Head lighthouse roars and Judith Maleena recites “Ode to the Western Wind” by Percy B. Shelley. In this way the sound of Alan Klein’s voice takes on the guise of the prophet Isaiah, in outpours of spellbinding morphemes…

“Quad or Knee” begins so silently and inconspicuously that you think there’s something wrong with the CD player, but soon vibrations and frictional sounds swirl and circle like ominous thoughts or fore-bearings, like in an Astrid Lindgren story of evil birdlike creatures with steel beaks and jack-knife claws. Transparent layers are inserted and pulled-out in haphazard vagrancies, sometimes sounding like permuted inhalations, sometimes like thousands of tiny grains falling onto a conveyor belt leading into a star-crusher contraption; a black hole of audio into which sounds empty their loads of compressions, diving head-first into oblivion, like we all do, or think we do, as life goes on – and the beat goes on, the beat goes on…
The intensity picks up considerably, and my night-shift ironworks memories do me the favor of providing analogies to sights and sounds of dross being emptied out by the Baltic Sea, as the huge mile-long building containing the rolling-mill hovered and vibrated like a giant threat in the night; a symbol of relentless power of transformation.

“Hoffman, Bored” is a title that doesn’t say much about the sounds achieved, which is why I’m here! The apparent pianism comes across as if you were playing the piano strings hands on while also banging the lowest keys on the keyboard. It’s a frictional seduction, a rumbling B 52 approach and a gentle plucking and hammering of a zither; perhaps a Persian or Indian santoor – and so I can’t keep destruction out of this work either, thinking of the Vietnam War as well as the uprisings in Kashmir… even though this logically has nothing to do with Mike Hoffman’s piano board … but there’s something in there, something… and the ingenuity of playing this piano is in line with for example Ross Bolleter’s Australian out-back bar pianisms!

“Guitars by Al” of course is what it says, but it gets across like a multilingual vibrancy of sped-up, slowed-down pneumatic drills in a workday stone-dust inhalation… There are rocks and minerals and dust in this music, for sure. There’s sun in there too, the rays shining in through the holes in the wall where the windows are to be inserted, or where they were…
The sound is magnificently layered here too, with darker, murmuring ripples of industrial hues forming the base for more intrusive, sharper, closer sounds, and the stone-dust almost have you sneeze… There is a meditative quality to this music, though rough, jagged, dangerous; a strange combination that maybe fighter plane pilots feel when soaring on high in imminent danger of robot attacks from below… and I would never have guessed this music had anything to do with guitars… but then again, it’s Al’s guitars!

“Fantastic Literature” is grainy, rubber-like at the out-set, and progresses like a multitude of rolling metal balls, circling a like-wise metallic, inward-tilting surface, like the upper part of a big funnel… but resorting to my all to common wartime allusions in this issue (I don’t know why) I think this may well be a recording of a giant fleet of planes crossing the channel to finally do away with Berlin… The rattling, more close-up sounds and the more distant, rumbling sounds put me right in the cockpit of one of those channel-crossers in 1944 or 1945… The timbral shifts and the hallucinatory overtone effects would refer to shifting pitches of airplane engines through the clouds and above the layer of clouds in stark moonlight, the belly full of bombs, roaring death-providers in a world to full of life…
The passage into a state of Bardo is reached seamlessly as the general pitch is slowly rising into an impossible vibratory frequency, unheard of anywhere else than in the dream-.like state of after-life passages of the spirit of man, overseen by Karmic scare-crows of one’s own mind… Nice!

“Walking Der Dog” is more downright concrete, mixing concrete elements of percussion and sound-scenes (a term borrowed from Stockhausen) into a rather intrusive blend of everyday paraphernalia, austere, gleaming, screeching garbage can audio, elusive voices and hinted-at street scenes… and perhaps this is not so strange, come to think of it, since this guy is… walking the dog, presumably down a street garnished with garbage cans a unemployed lazy-buns hanging out on the steps… Whatever the case, we love this bit of sonic info from the Americas!

“Day Back” sprays you in an instant shower of fragmented audio, from which you may wish to protect yourself with a steel umbrella. The shower is heavy, like the hail storm I experienced at work at the Texas Highway Department in Dallas, Texas on 3rd May 1979, when a series of tornados hit the Metroplex of Dallas and Fort Worth, and I hid myself with my work mates up under a highway overpass, and I was downright Swedish scared! The hail in If, Bwana’s “Day Back” is pure metal though; metal drops from a sulphur sky – so maybe it’s an alien world we’re in, on some yet to be discovered – or never to be discovered – planet of distant solar systems in unheard of galaxies, and God smiles insidiously as he taps his foot and wiggles his toe, on the bedside of Creation!

“Goo Pond” murmurs and cracks like a mighty glacier on the move in the night, shifting its heavy weight and scaring the inhabitants of base camps. The strength and power apparent in this piece is either icy or magmic, or both, as can happen sometimes in Iceland, for example, where volcanoes burn mighty holes through kilometer-deep inland ice, inviting you to a hellfire feast of ice, boiling water, steam and running lava. The infrasounds of such a natural catharsis are recorded in this here rumbling piece of If, Bwana audio… If that is the case, Goo Pond has got to be none other than the Atlantic Ocean, which is where the Vatnajökull glacier of Iceland pours its waste when it’s volcanoes erupt under the ice…

If, Bwana has managed to collect a number of highly enjoyable and sometimes almost scary pieces of forces and force-fields on this double-CD, and it’s reassuring to note that sonic ingenuity is free-flowing as ever in the Americas, no matter what!