The Three Fates (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos)
by the Italian artist Giorgio Ghisi (1520-82)
THE MUSIC — SONG BY SONG
1. Resolution Pending (1:14)
There is a haunting sound coming from the room where tapestries are made. A river of windy sounds has interlaced itself with the "too many strings" guitar. Something is about to happen, and it starts with a sound as haunting as Paul McCandless in his yearly Winter Solstice gathering near Cincinnati. These are ghostly naïve sounds that seem to have come from some other multiverse and maybe don't yet feel at home.
2. Magnetic Anistropy (7:00)
Magnetic anisotropy is defined as the dependency of magnetic properties on a preferred crystallographic direction. It is the required energy to deflect the magnetic moment in a single crystal from the easy to the hard direction of magnetization.
Patterns are developing. Something new. Angles are explored and angels are dancing their best Merce Cunningham to this song. We peak into the room where the tapestries are made and see two of The Sisters: one spinning and the other weaving. There is the savory smell of onions and veggies steaming from the kitchen where a third Sister works alone. Questions are forming, but they may be rhetorical questions. We are in another world, or the world backstage where all the directions come from. The "play" tells the story of the beginning of a new life. Amorphous cotton or bags of wool in skeins cloud the air until one sister makes them into strands at the spinning wheel. There is physics afoot in this dance of hidden laws and tendencies in the soul of the sound. The Second Sister takes the strand and combines it with other strands at her fateful loom. Kevin attacks the strings with industry. He runs up the strings and then we hear hammering. Carl explores the air like a flock of butterflies aimless and beautiful. Body and soul are singing, as the loom is set up and The Weaver begins to weave.
3. A Question, Lingering (7:25)
What is going on here? Where are we going with this? Some chords or clusters question it all like the first questions of a newborn baby made articulate by this plaintive wail of wind from Carl. We are hesitating at the loom as interlaced patterns are tentatively explored, but the weaving has begun in earnest. The strands are flowing fast from Clotho the Spinner to the Lachesis the Weaver, and the loom moves with purpose as though some path was growing underfoot in response to a need of the foot to travel. We linger, but there is a limit to the lingering. Carl sings, "We are only free at the moment of choice!" But Kevin counters, "He who waits too long has decisions made for him." A restlessness developes. Carl explores first words in a new language combining nouns, and verbs, for the Magic in the sound. The heart begins to beat, and the driver of this vehicle takes his position in the seat of the heart. Good things come to those who wait, but he who hesitates is lost. The first paradox has formed in the fabric of a new life.
4. The Weibel Instability (6:16)
The Weibel instability is a plasma instability present in homogeneous or nearly homogeneous electromagnetic plasmas which possess an anisotropy in momentum (velocity) space. This anisotropy is most generally understood as two temperatures in different directions. Burton Fried showed that this instability can be understood more simply as the superposition of many counter-streaming beams. In this sense, it is like the two-stream instability except that the perturbations are electromagnetic and result in filamentation as opposed to electrostatic perturbations which would result in charge bunching. In the linear limit the instability causes exponential growth of electromagnetic fields in the plasma which help restore momentum space isotropy. In very extreme cases, the Weibel instability is related to one- or two-dimensional stream instabilities.
The fog of newborn feelings are replaced by the "terrible twos" as the sound begins tell a story. The Weaver has chosen techniques to make this tapestry in its own unique tale. Consciousness of consciousness spins in circles, giving Carl some self-conscious spacial modes, with funny little dances going up, and different two-step prances going down. He asks his questions with authority and passion. In the very high notes, there is ecstasy and grit. Kevin launches into the weave with some bold attacks with fast feet skipping the stairs in between, and new notes, and modes and mischief. This dialogue resembles a fine abstract weaver's masterpiece, as the strand maker spins faster and faster. It is only then that the father of all meaning in a tapestry is let into the room. His name is Baba! The father of purpose and meaning. Baba like Baba Ram Dass in his "Only Dance There Is," but this is fabric, so it is the world famous Baba Black Sheep here to give the story some detail.
5. Filaments, Interlaced (7:24)
Sure enough the black thread from Baba Black Sheep takes us straight to the heart. Baba has done this before and always adds heart and definition to the story of the tapestry. Colors are forming in the dirty brown of the wool, which isn't the only miracle in filaments, interlaced. The right pattern does a trick in the light, and that is all the color we see. Baba's black thread makes the colors pop out and that moves the viewer of this nacent tapestry to something just this side of tears. Baba makes it all more interesting. Without a little border of Baba's black, the colors would look muddy. This the black surrounds each hue with definition. That is the way it has always been done. We are watching and listening the birth of a life both in the music and tapestry, so long as the expert weave surprises The Weaver, and the musicians stay the hell out of the way and play what they hear. It is damn fine work and its beauty describes nothing short of what is the moment right now at the center of the soul of everything. This is like William Burroughs wrote of the "Naked Lunch," where every morsel is revealed in detail at the tip of every fork. Hang onto your heart, we are headed somewhere! The fabric and the music are haunted and haunting. Spirits fly into existence briefly and then they disappear everywhere in the room, and some of them melt into the fabric permanently giving it all a a shimmer and a glow.
6. Interstitial Inquiries (7:40)
More questions! Don't we know by now there are no answers to the fundamental question? Of course we do, but these interstitial inquiries continue as the tapestry, and music, and the story of a life grows from one stage to another. We have progressed tomid-life questions, that is why it is sometimes called a crisis at the crossroads in time. We question, and there is some hesitancy because now the end is in sight. We are no longer growing and taking shape. Some of the patterns have been established, and the decisions have been made. What that will mean to us is not yet absolutely clear. We have been barreling toward a full form, but now it becomes clear that nothing will lasts forever, and all things must pass. And we might consider going back to start again, but there is no turning back the time.
7. Dialogues in Distance (5:46)
Time for introductions: Did nobody ask the names of the three sisters? They are Clotho, Lychesis and Atropos. They are the Moirae. They are The Fates. They existed before anything was born and before the Gods. To contradict The Sisters is the greatest of sins for the Greeks, and that is called Hubris. We are feeling a poignancy in the music, and the story of a life in the fabric has taken full shape and is heading towards a conclusion, though as yet there is a little time. The Spinner is where birth begins and birth continues through every new thing. The Weaver makes the arrangements of each Strand in Strands. The music has begun to sense the story now, and there is some feeling of surprise at knowing this "freedom" was only to deliver the song from another world, and we are only the vehicle and never the music, and never the tapestry, but only the vessel. This Dialogue in Distance knows that every distance is not near, but that every journey arrives somewhere and then the journey ends. Acceptance is the key if this music is to remain beautiful. Carl and Kevin come together in the realization there is no choice but to play through to the end.
8. Transparencies in Transition (7:33)
Familiar sights can be seen out the window of the sound as it moves in its chariot back to our home town. We have poignant, plaintive skeins of hope awaken the feeling that there may be some way to begin again, or something similiar as this. The food in the kitchen is starting to fill the room with savory, and the Spinner and Weaver begin to feel hungry for the meal after the tapestry is completed. Carl and Kevin explore with some nostalgia the beginning of their song where all the possibilities existed but nothing was certain. Some attempts at new and sweeter new song are explored. The wisdom is spoken: It would be better not to begin, but once begun it is better to finish. We hear sounds in the kitchen of chopping. The smell of fresh onion fills the air. The third Sister is preparing the final condiments for the meal, and they are chopped up last. So time is nearing a conclusion.
9. Intersecting Dispositions (6:37)
Dispositions are labels used to document, track, and report on the outcomes of calls and chats. There are two types of dispositions you can use to track call and chat outcomes: system dispositions and agent dispositions.
We have discovered mourning and hope. He that would learn would feel pain, says Aechylus. That longing can be heard in the music, and the resonnant visual in the story of the fabric. Baba's wool continues to flow, but he is nearly shorn. He is happy, because the wool that is now the story was heavy, but he wants to finish and go back to the field. The music now is a memory, but Samuel Beckett once warned in his essay on Proust: "The past is with us, heavy and dangerous." The effect is dispositive, but also intersecting. Will we come to the same conclusion together, or dissipate into a mist at the end of this life? There are no answers but only wait and see. Carl plays a little longer after Kevin has tapped out. He knows he can feel a little longer, but no one is allowed to mourn their own life.
10. Pending Resolution (1:23)
Nothing can stop the inevitable, and the big question here is whether we can reconcile to that knowledge in time to pass gently. There are warm broken chords, and baited breath, and a sweet tune in search of conclusion. The Cutter comes back into the room where the Spinner and Weaver look nackered and ready for their meal. And she brings a sharp knife to the tapestry and expertly cuts the fabric and the story is complete. The three of them admire this life in silence. Then together they take the tapestry to the Hall of Our Lives, and they hang it on the wall. That done, they clear the table and eat. Miraculously, Baba is rapidly growing another full body covered with black wool. Another story will begin after The Sisters finish their meal.
THE INTERVIEW
Billy’s questions to Carl Clements
For the album “Strand in Strands,” can you please tell me how you came to work with Kevin Kastning, and some story or stories about your many collaborations over the years. What have you discovered to be the idiom of this combined music? What has it made you feel? How has this form of collaboration changed your approach to improvisation, listening and teaching.
Thank you. A paragraph or two or as much or as little as you provide will weave into the review perfectly. What does it feel like? Is the most important question. It will help the listener frame their own listening experience. For instance, I thought at first that the disjointed or angular parts were warming up to the Eureka moments, but now I don’t hear that all. I love the moments with more space, and less of a direction. I hear in that the music that lives most uniquely in this form. Every note is music, every phrase is melody. This music seems to reach to the place where music is formed, and it may be the most beautiful before it reduces itself into the simpler flow of song.
UPDATE
When you are improvising together, we have established that there is a process of trusting the music that you are hearing and playing that about which you don’t feel a sense of personal ownership. The process is too fast for calculating and controlling. I believe that fosters a mindset similar to “mindfulness.” How has your adaptation to real-time collective composition affected your processes in real life? Have you been able to incorporate listening for the music in family interactions or daily decisions? Has the required processes that create this music changed your decision-making process? Has this music taught you to live differently? Are you living more in the moment?
(I believe it is necessary when listening to this music to adopt the same mental processes in order to hear it completely.)
Carl Clement’s reply:
Kevin and I first met in the mid-‘80s while we were both attending the Berklee College of Music. We were roommates for several years, and we played together in Kevin’s band at that time (the Kevin Kastning Unit). While we were serious students of jazz at that time, I think we really connected because we were both looking for personal approaches to improvisation and composition that transcended boundaries of genre, style, etc. While listening to John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, etc., we were also listening to Bartok, Webern, Stravinsky, etc., and trying to work out how all this (and so much more music out there) could help us find or own means of expression.
After our Boston years in the ‘80s, I went to CalArts for my MFA, then to New York, then India, back to Boston, back to New York, and now the Pioneer Valley (where I teach at Amherst College). But we remained closely in touch throughout this time, and I’ve continued to think of him as one of my closest friends and musical collaborators. Once we were able to resume making music together, the years in between only seemed to strengthen our rapport. I’d been delving into North Indian classical music quite deeply (it was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation), continuing to play jazz in its many forms (or many of its forms – there are too many variants for me to pretend to cover them all), and listening to diverse forms of music from 20th-21st century to musics of Latin America, South and Central Asia and around the world. Kevin had similarly been exploring diverse musical forms and ideas, and maybe because of our common foundations, personal rapport, and passion for improvisation without boundaries, our musical connection had just gotten stronger.
Our latest album Strand in Strands is our sixth duet album, and I think we both feel that it’s taken our collaboration a step further. It’s difficult for me to pin down a single idiom, genre, or style for this album or our other collaborations. We don’t think of it as jazz, though I still continue to play music that might be considered jazz. I don’t know if I’d call it contemporary classical music, since the degree of and approach to improvisation doesn’t really match approaches in 20th-21st century European-derived art music that I’m familiar with. But in the present day, diverse musical forms seem to be finding common ground, and genre boundaries are fading among the more progressive musicians and composers in various genres. In the end, we just express ourselves as honestly as we can using the various musical languages and modalities that we’ve encountered and studied.
For me, my collaborations with Kevin, including our trio work with Sandor Szabo, have been essentially conversations that allow us to communicate in ways that I haven’t found to be possible through words. Maybe a kind of collaborative musical poetry in the form of dialog? The languages we’ve developed aren’t ends in themselves – I think we really just want to draw on whatever will best enable us to say the things that can’t be said. It’s an ongoing dialog that doesn’t have any resolution that I’m aware of. I don’t know that there’s any arrival point, but I find the journey to be very fulfilling. It’s based on intensive listening to each other, being sure to take in what the other is saying and responding in kind. Hopefully the recordings can bring receptive listeners to some of the same places we’ve traveled, and maybe they can participate in the dialog at some level.
In response to your follow-up question about the music’s affect on real life, I can say that for me there would be some parallels to “mindfulness.” I suppose it affects every aspect of my life in some way, including personal interactions, daily decisions, teaching, etc. But I don’t know if I can really delineate to what degree the music has affected my life or my life has affected my music. They’re really all part of the same thing. There’s so much interplay between my life and my music that cause and effect becomes very difficult to determine. But I can say that my decision to make music the center of my life was largely based on the realization that I didn’t think I could be completely whole or completely sane without dedicating myself to music. Interestingly (to me, at least), I’ll be doing my first 10-day meditation retreat later this month. The fact that I haven’t done this previously is I think due both to my hesitation to be away from my instruments for that long, and the idea that my music has been its own form of meditation, or “mindfulness.” But I can say that my musical dialogs with Kevin have been wonderful opportunities to enter into a kind of shared transcendental state – that is to say, the immediacy of interaction and response displaces all other thought and allows us to explore places that I don’t think we would encounter in any other way (though I believe that all of the arts have the potential to allow for similar journeys).
I do think that with fully engaged listening, the listener can at least be aware of the places we traveled, and ideally experience their own journey. Whether that’s the same journey Kevin and I experienced (or whether Kevin and I shared the same journey), I can’t really say.
My previous comments to Billy:
It's hard for me to say where the boundary between conscious and unconscious is in our collaborative composition. It tends to be too immediate to call it completely conscious, but nonetheless, there is some conscious though sometimes entering into the process. For example, I'll often take note of a particular idea, whether melodic, rhythmic, a collection of notes, etc., that either of us has played, and have some consciousness of how I might develop, transform, contrast, etc. that idea. But the way that actually manifests is decided in the moment based on where the music has traveled since then, and what is happening at a particular moment.
INTERVIEW OF KEVIN KASTNING
KEVIN KASTNING'S responses are in BROWN
“Strands,” can you please tell me how you came to work with Carl Clements, and some story or stories about your many collaborations over the years.
I met Carl in early 1985. We were housemates and were students at Berklee College of Music. Carl and I played our first concert together in June 1985 at the Berklee Concert Pavilion in Boston. That concert was with The Kevin Kastning Unit, which was my jazz group that played in Boston in the mid to late '80s. I wrote all the material for the Unit, but Carl also contributed some pieces. At that time, I was playing electric 6-string guitar only, and Carl played mostly tenor saxophone, but later in the group's existence he branched out to soprano sax, too. The Unit stayed busy, and there are some studio recordings from 1987 and 1988.
As my compositions became more complex and were arguably no longer within the jazz realm, I disbanded the unit and focused on composing for a few years. By this time, I was composing chamber works such as string quartets, wind quintets, piano sonatas, and other chamber works. There are also some chamber orchestra pieces. In the late 1990s or so, Carl and I again started playing a few duo performances together around Boston and New York City. We recorded our first duo album, "Dreaming As I Knew," around 2005 or so. "Strands" is our sixth album together, with more already in the works.
Since the first time we played together, Carl and I have had a strong artistic connection. It's just always been there. We became close friends almost immediately, and I think that strong friendship connection may have further enhanced our artistic connection as well.
What have you discovered to be the idiom of this combined music?
For my music, I don't really think in terms of labels or categories. Over the 30-plus years that Carl and I have worked together, we've gone from a jazz framework of music to music composed in real-time, which is the direction and approach for each of our duo albums.
Carl and I have many musical and artistic influences; most of those are shared. Carl’s principal area of influence is jazz; Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane. When I was studying and playing jazz, my primary influences were Bill Evans, John Coltrane, and various artists on ECM records. Prior to my jazz period, I studied classical music, and still do. My principal influences are not, nor were they ever, guitarists. My influences and heroes are classical composers: Bach, Weiss, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Webern, Shostakovich, Carter; too many to mention. Additionally, I’ve been strongly impacted and directed by the solo piano works of Keith Jarrett. Carl, too, is passionate about classical music, so we have large areas of overlapping influences. We also live in the world of real-time improvisation, and over the years have had hours and hours of discussion surrounding this approach. I believe that no matter the compositional medium; be it manuscript paper or tape, composed music is as valid as music composed in real-time. They are equal. I see composed music as frozen improvisation, so the two models have far more in common than most people realize or consider. However, to be effective in real-time composition, I believe that you have to first be a composer.
What has it made you feel?
Working with Carl brings a sense of freedom, which is true of all my collaborators. Carl is not just a player, but also a composer, so we can move in the same directions at the same time. It brings a feeling of no boundaries, really.
When you are improvising together, we have established that there is a process of trusting the music that you are hearing and playing that about which you don’t feel a sense of personal ownership. The process is too fast for calculating and controlling. I believe that fosters a mindset similar to “mindfulness.” How has your adaptation to real-time collective composition affected your processes in real life? Have you been able to incorporate listening for the music in family interactions or daily decisions? Has the required processes that create this music changed your decision-making process? Has this music taught you to live differently? Are you living more in the moment?
I don’t think the music or its direction has impacted my day-to-day life. However, I believe that if you’re an improvising musician, who and what you are is what is heard in your music. Ergo, for me, life and music are so tightly integrated that it’s hard to say where one leaves off and the other begins.
How has this form of collaboration changed your approach to improvisation, listening and teaching.
I no longer teach, so it’s had no impact on that. However, when you’re in the realm of non-solo real-time composition, listening is key. It’s the first and most important thing; it’s the prime directive. Not only listening to the other person or persons, but to the composition itself. I’ve been working in duo settings since before Carl and I started recording together, so I can’t say that this collaboration has impacted my approaches beyond any kind of real-time duo setting. However, Carl and I tend to have a kind of mental telepathy when working together. Of our six albums, the first five were recorded at my old studio. We were in separate rooms with no windows and no visual contact. Visual cues were obviously not possible, but when you listen to those records, it all sounds composed. I credit most of that to our long-running partnership, and the rest of it to listening. “Strand in Strands” was recorded as a remote project, where one of us would record our part and send the tracks to the other person for them to record their parts. I like working in both modes, and tracking remotely worked out very well for us. I usually prefer being “live” in the studio, but remote recording projects are equally valid given that you have the right people, and just another method or approach. I feel that “Strand in Strands” is our strongest record to date.
CONTACTS
Kevin Kastning on:
Email: billymwb@gmail.com
Submissions accepted. Send a link, not a CD. Lyrics and artwork plus any information is appreciated. Access to artists for interviews encouraged.
Very nicely prefaced. The track descriptions are also brilliantly articulated....Thanks for the mindful interviews.
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