Christmas time has been especially blessed with fabulous gifts 2006. You know, only rarely does a truly surprising disc come along – and now, in a short period, I’ve received three such remarkable recordings, from Matthias Kaul (Cover Versions), Walter Thompson (Soundpainting Haydn) and… Victoria Jordanova (Postcard from Heaven). This review deals with the latter, but Kaul’s and Thompson’s new CDs will be reviewed shortly at Sonoloco too.

Let me first quote a few lines from Relja Penezic’s liner notes, where he describes his experience hearing the CD for the first time, driving at night from San Francisco to Los Angeles:

“[…] Once on the open road, I pushed the play button. The sounds, projecting unique sense of space and color, […] …turned the car into [a] cathedral floating over Highway 5 through the night sky illuminated by millions of stars.”

I rarely get the sense of sheer beauty or spacious spiritual or physical realms when I listen to John Cage’s music, perhaps with the approximate exception of his own performance of Cheap Imitation (Cramps Records) and some of the most successful renderings of Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, buy, say, Julie Steinberg (Music and Arts) and Yuji Takahashi (Fylkingen Records). It’s often more of a witty practicality that comes to mind, or an auditive intellectualism with a quirky smile added in the corner of the mouth; a wry glance from some mysterious core of ingenuity – but not this soaring beauty. That’s why this music is so surprising, as it approaches in some kind of free fall, totally relaxed and yet powerful, like the orbit of the International Space Station as it keeps on falling and falling around the Earth, one circumference in 90 minutes. The astronauts could hear this CD one and a half time per round.

John Cage’s performance instructions for this late and singular work is provided with the rich and informative booklet:

Jordanova had to find her own way of interpreting this piece. There were certain difficulties to be faced, as she describes:

For further guidance into the complexity of Cage’s intentions and Jordanova’s solutions for this interpretation, please consult ArpaViva’s website.

Listening to Postcard from Heaven is indeed soaring, or flushing through the wormholes of stunning geometries! A couple of weeks ago, when I was doing my regular nocturnal racing bike exercise 30 kilometers across asphalt roads through Swedish forests and across open fields, which I do every night – more to open up my mind to the flow of uninhibited creativity than for the sake of physical fitness (which, however, is a welcome side-effect!) – I found myself completely alone at a particular stretch of road that traverses a couple of kilometers of fields in a straight line. There were no cars behind or up ahead; no head lights disturbing winter darkness. The night was clear; not a cloud – and the energy pouring in from myriads of celestial bodies washed over me electro-magnetically, like a continuous thundering silence through dark voids. I stopped biking, and turned off my headlamp, standing still, feeling my anatomy, warm and breathing, below me in the cold, the stars glimmering intensely above and around, in a 360 degrees canopy of relentless energy. Alive! Everything alive! Every moment a new moment; each second fresh! Reality expanding at the speed of light, 300 000 kilometers per second. My consciousness the consciousness of the Universe! All of our consciousnesses the consciousness of the Universe studying itself, brooding over it itself. There is no division. We are the Universe.

I stood there for a good while, letting everything be, as planet gravity held me firmly in place – until the first head light of a car approached a kilometer away, breaking the spell, but not the feeling, which remains with me – and this feeling is exactly the same in Victoria Jordanova’s and Pamela Z’s version of John Cage’s Postcard from Heaven. Remarkable!

Victoria Jordanova explains the playing techniques, making it easier for the reader to imagine the music:

Of course, we only hear Jordanova and Z, but multitracked, in various layers of soaring and plucked sounds, like gravel on a Lapland mountain slope below the lofty glaciers, above the frozen rock deserts of many of my mountain hikes, where the view always changes, from minute to minute, and where the sound of running water delivers a shifting array of pitches, from the bell-like trickling of the brook close by, to the roaring thunder of a waterfall ten kilometers away across the valley. Like these shamanistic Lapland impressions, this music opens up new views all the time, finding its way cautiously through the light bursts of dew drops and stars, on spider legs through miniature realms of gravel, or on the wings of an eagle in breathtaking thermals above icy expanses.

How much of this music is Cage, how much Jordanova? Well, I honestly don’t care at all. If this much intriguing, shamanistic beauty and soaring, inward and outward traveling takes off in Jordanova’s interpretation of Cage’s performance instructions, I’m with her for the ride, all the way.

Pamela Z’s vocals are important ingredients in these auditive excursions and sonic mountaineering adventures. Jordanova had instructed Z to record the raga’s pitches non-vibrato, pianissimo, holding them as long as her breath allowed, in high as well as low tessituras. In the end these solo vocals and harp recordings fascinated Jordanova enough to include six of them after Postcard from Heaven on this CD, naming them Solo Ragas from Postcard from Heaven.