"Lost Analog" Barry Schrader "Exploring Creation in an Imaginary World"

LOST ANALOG

Barry Schrader

Exploring Creation in an 

Imaginary World

Barry Schrader: 

There’s a line from Robert Lowell that I’ve often quoted to explain part of my creative intentions: "I want to make something imagined, not recalled."

Barry Schrader's music is never a recollection. The music on "Lost Analog" is beyond what we would call "Grand." This music is the sound of events too large to have ever been witnessed, and far too elemental in nature and structure to be sentimental. When I first listened to "Death of the Red Planet" from Lost Analog, I heard the sound coming from everywhere at once and it depicted in my imagination creation itself. 

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

No one could witness what I heard in this music and live, or so it makes me feel. This music is so HUGE, it is necessarily indifferent to human concerns. An avalanche, an catastrophic earthquake or a devastating flood would have more capacity for sympathy than the imaginary event this music depicts. I believe few composers would venture this far into creation and come back sane enough to market the product. This music is a force grander than nature. The force this album depicts is at the very limits of what a mind can imagine.

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

—"Epilogue" by Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

What techniques and theories could be of any help to sing the creation or destruction of a world? The potential for this sound in the existence of a Buchla or Moog electronic music machine has seldom been approached with such fierce, unfettered and fearless imagination. To witness this music — because it is visual beyond any sound I have known or feared — changes a person. After the first listen to Lost Analog, my thoughts abandoned my mind completely for some time. If you can imagine witnessing the creation of a world from a safe distance with a few friends, who would speak first after that? In another earlier time, this music would have been banned, and Barry excommunicated for attempting to depict a power equal to God. 

Barry Schrader to Billy in response to the text of Mark Strand's poem:  

Mark Strand was a great poet.  I’m deeply taken by the following passage, because I always strive for what I consider “perfection” in what I compose, even though I know it’s impossible to actually achieve it, and I never have:

If only there were a perfect moment in the book; 

if only we could live in that moment, 

we could begin the book again 

as if we had not written it, 

as if we were not in it.

—From the poem "The Story Of Our Lives" by Mark Stand

That wish on Barry's part is a bit nuts! But after hearing what he has achieved, most saner composers should be sold at a discount for a week once a year. Why buy timid music, without first acknowledging that the boundaries have shifted beyond traditional instruments. The limits of imagination are barriers to our understanding of the scale and scope of what the mind can "know." Grow up! And take your place in the big cosmos! Listen here! The earth is not the center of the universe. Not anymore. Never was. That sort of knowledge can be FELT in this music, and that feeling is what may change you.

Having seen Your universal form that I had never seen before, I feel great joy. And yet, my mind trembles with fear. Please have mercy on me and again show me Your pleasing form, O God of gods, O Abode of the universe.

Baghavad Gita 11.45

I have spent a little time contemplating the nature of an electronic music creation machine, and how it might shape the form of a composition. What would you do, if presented with every possible sound of any parameter, in any timbre, and any tonal value? A banjo sounds like it is telling the truth. A piano has the ability to play in every key, but never in true harmony. An orchestra has the grand collective feeling of many musicians cooperating for a collective sound. 

But the Buchla offers everything at once and not one clue what to do with it. The Buchla is all-powerful musically and yet it is utterly indifferent to its own music, or to the listener, and feels not a whit of interest in the composer or his composition. It is as though there were a machine that would sculpt a perfect human being using myself as raw material. What changes would I make? Would I remain human after perfecting myself according to my own creation? Would I frighten the cats? Wouldn't it be better to let things be, and maybe learn to play the banjo?

Billy's words are in black and not offset from the margin.  

All of the quotes below (in brown and offset from the margin) are from Barry Schrader's text to Billy in November of 2022. 

 

I was writing feverishly on a bit of a manic episode to Barry Schrader, but he managed to feed me a few words that eclipse everything I wrote to him in two long paragraphs texting on Messenger. I have broken up his writing into smaller paragraphs and broken them up with my own commentary.

My ultimate compositional goal has always been to create new worlds in the medium of music.  While I’ve spoken and written about more technical and academic (musicological) aspects of my compositions and the works of others, I’ve rarely ventured into publicly discussing the domains of the aesthetic and the emotional.  This is because these things are difficult to describe and they’re not highly regarded in academic circles.   

I think it is a damn shame that the seemingly infinite possibilities of electronic music could be allowed to eclipse the emotional content of the music! I make it a point never to discuss technique in public. If I am "impressed" when I leave a concert, I should get my money back. This music has deep emotional roots, and deeper than that is knowledge, and when I listen as deep as I can go, I sense a profound wisdom in this album that goes to the core of what it means that matter came to exist in this particular Universe in a form that could spin in balls around other balls in a composition capable of sustaining life. 

Nevertheless,  I’ve always wanted to create music that would transport the listener to realms of the imagination beyond what they might be able to conjure for themselves.  This was something that impressed me about music from an early age (I began playing piano at 5) although, for me, not all music seemed able to generate this transportation into the fantastic.  I found that electronic music allowed me to do this in ways not possible with acoustic instruments.   

 What a compositional goal is this! I have heard it said that music could transport us into our imaginations, but never "transport the listener to realms of the imagination beyond what they might be able to conjure themselves." Holy crap! I have certainly settled for less and not felt I was limiting my listening. What courage must it take in the imagination to go that far, and hope to retain a hint of sanity? Barry Schrader's "indifferent" explosive creation depicted on this album is not benevolent, but it isn't the disturbing fever dream of Cthulu either. The effect of this "indifferent" power on my mind is to put my world in place, and bring my ego to its proper size. So the power may be indifferent, but the effect of this omnipotent sound on our collective experience takes our “imagination beyond what [we] might be able to conjure.” The result is spiritual to me and meditative.

It took me some time to gain the knowledge and expertise to be able to effectively use the technology.  At the same time, I wanted the technology to be invisible to the listener, as it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.  In order to do this, one must have great control over both the technology and the compositional material, and I’ve spent my life trying to gain ever-increasing mastery over both of these things.  I think of what I’m doing as extending the traditions of music into new incarnations, an expansion of the past, not a break from it.   

As I expected, it takes a shit-ton of knowledge and practice to create on the "infinite possibilities" machine. I don't care about that. As LaMonte Young put it, “If listeners aren't carried away to Heaven, I'm failing.” In Barry Schrader's Lost Analog, I witnessed the creation of an imaginary world beyond my capacity to dream. Close enough. Next time I will specify heaven maybe, but it was a helluva ride!

With the exception of a few commercial projects, I’ve always composed what I wanted to with little regard for what might be considered commercially viable or academically “correct” music for the time.  I consider my music to be very personal, but I also hope that it will communicate to others.  I also realize that my work sounds arcane to many people.  

There! He said it! This music is not "correct" and the Spanish Inquisition will surely be notified to lock him up and re-educate him in the joys of orthodoxy. Or maybe that "rebel" spirit is just the thing your record collection has been lacking all these years. 

How many music lovers are saying right now that there is nothing new, and what is current isn't as good as the "old school?" Maybe this music is just what we need right now to transport our minds away from the lies and spin and clicks and likes of our current paucity of human interaction and unimaginative sound.

You be the judge! Take the blue album or stick with the red one you already own. 

BARRY SCHRADER

Website

Blog
Bandcamp

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. 

"Children of Conflict" Peter Xifaras / Czech Symphony Orchestra — Orchestrated Empathy

"Children of Conflict" 

Peter Xifaras

Czech Symphony Orchestra

Orchestrated Empathy 

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. 

To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, 

thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. 

But they are murdered children all the same.

—Kurt Vonnegut 

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who 
maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

      Beauty awakens the soul to act."

—Dante Alighieri

Peter Xifaras has done a simple thing. This is a 20-minute EP. There is an orchestra, a little bit of narration, and a singer from some foreign land. Oh yes! There are six videos that go with the six short movements of this little piece of orchestral music. He uses some modalities to evoke a foreign feeling. And the subjects of this small work are children. The setting is any of a few war-torn countries in the current news. And this little piece will break your heart. It is supposed to do that, and you should listen to it in order to have your heart broken for 20 short minutes. After that, you will never watch the war described in numbers on TV without feeling the loss of children lost in those numbers. 

When adults wage war, children perish.

—Elie Wiesel

We were children

Thrust into war

And once it ends

What will we become?

Why the hell would you subject yourself to such emotion? As Jesse said while healing the sick in Greaser's Palace: "If ya feel ya healed." The news has taught how to feel less and less. The valiant children dying as heroes have given the world the gift to be able to celebrate our wars in patriotic ceremonies. Yeah, but that doesn't change a thing. As Kurt Vonnegut reminded us before he died, "But they are murdered children just the same."

Every war is a war against children.

—Eglantyne Jenn

So I am writing about this little piece of music and its videos because it is better to feel than to embrace the little death in numbers and statistics of war that we are told to see as the scoreboard of victory. No sides have been taken here, but for the advocacy of dead children and the lives of those who have lost their childhoods to the hell of a war before they even learned to throw a ball. 

The only way to eliminate war is to love our children 

more than we hate our enemies.

—Golda Meir

I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: 

“Mother, what was war?”

—Eve Merriam

It is so very easy to talk about war. Nobody is in favor of it. It feels noble to express the most obvious sentiment and call that wisdom. I don't know the answer to any conflict, but I have taken the 20-minute challenge to see and hear and feel the losses of dead children and even worse the "Children of Conflict" living through total madness — gassed with the inevitable cloud of lies that have always defined the onset of war.

In war, truth is the first casualty.

—Aeschylus

When I can't bear to say what needs to be said, or when I just don't have the words, I look to better wisdom like Aeschylus, Elie Wiesel, Eglantyne Jenn,  Kurt Vonnegut, Eve Merriam, Golda Meir, and Dante Alighieri. I even repeat their words in the same damn review if I feel I have to. We need to weep for the children, or we will become too dead inside to raise our own families without teaching them fear, bigotry, hatred, white nationalism, xenophobia, and a cultivated ignorance of the lives of our forefathers. 

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. 

To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, 

thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. 

But they are murdered children all the same.

—Kurt Vonnegut 

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who 
maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

      Beauty awakens the soul to act."

—Dante Alighieri

Beauty awakens the soul to act. Peter Xifaras and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra have made something beautiful to awaken your souls to act. What are you gonna do?

The following two paragraphs descript the composer's prior accomplishments and they were provided by the artist:

Peter Xifaras is music embodied. In his roles as a solo-artist, film-composer, guitarist, orchestrator, and producer, he has garnered praise for successfully crossing over musical boundaries. He is just as comfortable writing a piece for symphonic orchestra as he is laying down a wailing blues solo on guitar. Peter's music has been heard on hundreds of radio stations and has been on SiriusXM rotation for over a decade. As a multi-award winning artist, Peter's music has also topped Billboard's Classical and Crossover charts.

The diverse nature of Peter's genre-bending compositions has attracted a wide range of talented guest artists who frequently appear on his releases as well as his SymphoneX Orchestra® project. Peter recently recorded with the great legendary jazz-trumpeter Shunzo Ohno for an upcoming release, composed a 6 movement classical work for social justice recorded by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and is currently working on a concerto for classical guitar - all while getting ready to score the next feature-film produced by JawDoc productions.

Websites:

Peter Xifaras 

Symphony X

Music With No Expiration

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. 

"Invisible Fabric" David Beardsley — Workingman's Ecstasy: 29 Years of Microtonality, Just Intonation and Minimalism

Invisible Fabric

David Beardsley

Only your notes are pure contraption,

Only your song is an absolute gift.

—W.H. Auden from "The Composer"

My compositions are a contraption too! 

😄 Feed it notes!

—David  Beardsley

I was a little surprised at David Beardsley's response to those two lines of Auden. His response was playful and not a bit pretentious. He didn't talk of heaven or ecstacy — those were my words. He joked of notes. Then I remembered a story about Auden that I had forgotten. The story goes that when students wanted to study with him, he would ask, "Why?" When they answered, "Because I have something to say," he would send them to the English composition teacher to write essays. But the student who answered "I like to play with words" was invited to study with the poet. Only a composer would say, "😄 Feed it notes," but that is the job, so you might as well get used to it.

My years of adventure are history. 

I just pay the bills and write music now.

—David  Beardsley

Music as an Appliance

When I am asked what is my favorite music, I respond, "When the day is hot, I love my air conditioner. At breakfast, I am fond of my toaster." After that cryptic response, I am generally left alone. But I really mean it! Music is a mental, emotional and spiritual appliance! I listen to David Beardsley music because of what it does for me. And what it does is sometimes necessary! 

I'm usually looking for intervals in the tuning that show a special mood, a color we may not be familiar with. The pieces from this year have a compositional logic inside that make them pulse forward. Invisible fabric.

—David  Beardsley

When my mind will not shut off, and meditation is not going to happen, I desperately need some music that my brain will not decipher and dismiss, and that for me is anything by composer David Beardsley. Each note on all of the many albums of his music has its own story to tell, and there is no repetition at all to my ears. And all of the changes are subtle. The timbre and tone, duration and silence between notes has been felt in the composer at that moment, because he knows his job is to "😄 Feed it notes." What I hear is a performance that leads me into a meditative state that could be described as "heaven," on a day when nothing else will calm my burning brain. 

If listeners aren't carried away to Heaven, I'm failing.

—LaMonte Young

ORIGINS

There was a Rolling Stone article about La Monte in '75. Sometime in the '80s, there were marathons on WKCR. I finally got to hear the Well Tuned Piano and other pieces on the radio. 1996-2003, I was at the Dream House quite a bit. La Monte looks just like the photos, denim.

—David  Beardsley

The seed had been planted. David learned by listening, and also by reading which continues today.  When asked about his weekend even now, his response: "I'll be reading about minimalism and listening to music." 

My first acquaintance with Robert Frost was when I was twenty-two. ... I thought that I could do better, so I started writing my own poetry.

—Joseph Brodsky

1980, Terry Riley's Shri Camel was released. I read a review, ran out and bought a copy and was interested. I didn't do more than listen for years. In 1994, I bought a digital synthesizer that could be microtonal and I was off to the races. I think it was affordable. I had a credit card.

—David  Beardsley

A more common response to La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman and most composers of the 60s and 70s would be listen in awe and wonder. Not David Beardsley! He didn't listen casually and his commitment to this new sound was total!

I was a regular at AFMM (American Festival of Microtonal Music) concerts. I was at every one for a few years, same with La Monte Young's Dream House. And the Harry Partch instruments with staying with Dean Drummond & the NewBand.

—David  Beardsley

David Beardsley has become an authority on this music, but few among us would become a composer in response the music at the American Festival of Microtonal Music. Very few. He has read the theory, and heard the music, but most of all since 1994 he has learned by composing with a remarkably talented ear for the sound, timing, timbre and form of a music designed to replace racing thoughts with subtle sound. 

The Sound of the higher level naturally reaches far downward. Further, the flow of the subtle substance (Sound) is further than the flow of the gross substance (Sound), and naturally the subtle permeates the gross substance.

— Maharishi Mehi Paramahansa Ji, The Philosophy of Liberation (Moksha-Darsan)

David Beardsley is far too practical to attach the insights of a yogi to his music. He likes to play with sound, and he has refined his compositions to a very high level with that "liking." As a listener, I am not constrained to such practical concerns. To me, the freedom from my own thoughts this music affords me can feel absolutely miraculous. I have listened to about a dozen of David Beardsley's compositions varying from 10 minutes to over an hour in length. For me, they are like a successful meditation in which the repetitive "demon" thoughts in my mind are eventually banished. The relief is palpable and pervasive. 

Q. Are you adjusting for more harmony or finding an interval that moves you outside the norm?

David Beardsley: Searching for an emotional response that doesn't exist in equal temperament systems.

What more could a listener ask than that? I truly believe that music can function as a kind of appliance in my life, but only if it is GOOD music. I reviewed an album that called itself "healing" before, and I trashed it for that claim. All good music is healing, and that album was exclusively one note played on a didgeridoo! Real composers don't make those kind of claims in my experience.

I'm usually trying out something new, a compositional or tuning idea. I hope someone likes it.

—David  Beardsley

I like it. 

David Beardsley's CV

There is link below to David Beardsley's "bio" on his website. His musical education and experience is detailed there at much greater length. He has earned his place in your heart with 29 years of careful listening and composing. The most important part of a musicians body are his ears. I invite the reader of this review to go now and listen using one of the links below. 

The cover of Invisible Fabric hammers it home. The magenta colors are exactly what Marian Zazeela's Magenta Lights look like in the [La Monte Young's] Dream House. Also like the cover of the 2nd Dream of China. Folks make that connection.

—David  Beardsley

If you are in the mood for Beethoven or the Rolling Stones, this might not be the night for David Beardsley. But I promise you will find a day in which nothing else will do. I will be listening to one or another of David's many albums long after this review, and there will be days, as there have already been days, when there will be no better choice than this composer and great lover of music, David Beardsley.

Piano lessons when I was a kid for a few years. Music theory in high school. Self taught guitar player, although I don't play any more. Raga classes with Michael Harrison and a few raga lessons with La Monte too. Just the very basics.

The raga phase was when I was around 40. I was already writing microtonal music, but didn't discuss just intonation with them too much. I made it a point to hang with the NYC microtonalists.

—David  Beardsley

Even this Cliff Notes version of David Beardsley's education and experience is sufficient to emphasize how much deeper he has gone into the practical process of composing this music. David knows a thing or two about this music, because he has composed a thing or two over 29 years. I hear that experience when I listen, and I relax knowing that I am in good hands. And then this music takes me somewhere I really seriously need to go.

Conclusion

Music takes many forms and we can listen to it for many reasons. The important thing to look for, when choosing something new and unfamiliar to listen to, is whether or not you are being sold a product, or a genuine labor of love. I can hear the love in all of David Beardsley's music, but David may be more practical, and even more subtle in his words. 

Just intonation sounded interesting (a 1975 Rolling Stone article about La Monte Young) and I loved it when I finally heard it (1980, Terry Riley, Shri Camel) — the resonant, beatless large intervals and the sparkling microtones.

—David  Beardsley

I heard an artist long ago make an astonishing statement that I had almost forgotten until this moment writing about David Beardsley. This applies as well to David's music as it did to that artist, whose name, unfortunately, I can no longer remember:

This is what I do. People buy it, and they call it art. I would do it if they didn't call it art! I would do it if they didn't buy it!

—The Unknown (Forgotten) Artist

David sells his albums on Bandcamp. You have buy one for download for $2. What else can you get for $2 that might make a difference in your life?

David Beardsley's Links

Biography

Bandcamp Discography

YouTube Home Page

The Closing Verses

During the “interview” process, it became clear that both the composer David Beardsley and the reviewer believe that Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching” Chapter 12 should be part of this review. The composer prefers Ursula McGuin’s translation, which has been included here immediately below:

12
Not wanting
The five colors
blind our eyes.
The five notes
deafen our ears.
The five flavors
dull our taste.

Racing, chasing, hunting,
drives people crazy.
Trying to get rich
ties people in knots.
So the wise soul
watches with the inner
not the outward eye,
letting that go,
keeping this.

Go to Bandcamp for the active links to these albums. The images below are not linked to anything.

Some older and notable David Beardsley albums:

The Billy’s Music Without Borders Index of Reviews, Interviews & Discussions

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. 

"Levitation 1" Kastning / Gardony — Spontaneous Creation for the Pleasure of Song

 

Cover art by Geoge Karunov (RUSSIA)

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were 

writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be 

the human condition that most resembles levitation.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I believe this album is the best example of an evolving new musical form of composition. After years of adherence to the written page, Classical music has begun to return to its improvisational roots. Kevin Kastning has embraced that return tenaciously for more than a decade with spontaneous duets and solo performances that transport me consistently to a deeper experience of music. This Levitation 1 pairing with master musician Laszlo Gardony on piano and Kevin Kastning on 36-string contra guitar has exceeded all expectations. If collaborative Classical composition needed a "proof of life," this album leaves no room for doubt. This revitalized form of Classical music is very much alive and well.

    This music was improvised similtaneous and effortlessly by these two artists for the shear pleasure of song, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation. This album need not be explained to be loved. It is not necessary to know that these artists are improvising to enjoy this music at all. This is the album of new music that could be sent to my working class and sainted Mother and expect she would hear the beauty and feel the love in this music. This album is, in short, a miracle. In Levitation 1, these two musicians improvise out of whole cloth so perfectly joined in song that they might just as well be playing from memory, or reading the notes from a carefully composed page of written music. This music is most certainly transcendent. 

Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be 

transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. 

—Charles Ives

    In addition to the shear quality of the transformation of two musicians into one music, which I have heard increasingly in Kastning's albums to great success, is the unique pairing possible because of the range of these two instruments. There are moments when Gardony seems to play a cloud over which Kastning can fly on those 36 strings. Kastning with the range and timbre of his unique instrument paints a drop curtain adding texture and context for Gardony's invention. The trading back and forth is so seamless as to be one voice to my ears. I find I am no longer concerned with the music at all, but instead I am transported to a lofty place where my own life can be reimagined in context of the infinite. Yeah boy, howdy! 

   What makes all this possible is an understanding of the nature and mindset of improvisation that has long been articulated by Laszlo Gardony in his teaching and interviews, and by Kevin Kastning as I have come to know him through the past decade. Neither one of these artists are "creating" the music as it happens in the sense of owning the notes and expressing themselves. That would be a competition of sorts, and it couldn't sound like this. Instead, both artists are playing the music that is gifted to them and they are both staying the hell out of the way while playing the music they hear from the Source. As nutty as that sounds, it is the only way to play together so completely. Neither one is taking the lead or supporting the other in a conscious way. As Laszlo Gardony said in answer to my question about what he is thinking while improvising (Interview):

No. I was one with each note. I was each note.

—Laszlo Gardony

    I believe that if you go to a concert and you leave impressed, you should get your money back. That's not why anybody goes to see music. You oughta get a song, and sometimes a new way of seeing the world. I have shared my personal journey while listening to this album below, and you may take note that there is very little claptrap about what the musicians are doing. You might think what I am writing below is irrelevant to the album I am reviewing, and you might be right. I didn't write it for anyone's benefit but my own, but I noticed that the album had taken me to the sea of music, where an overwhelming experience of the DNA of sound was there for me to experience. And after the music was over, my own world with all its aches and pains and little details and problems looks very different. I wasn't impressed. I was transformed. 

    At this point, the reader is invited to stop now and rush over to the music, or journey forward and read some more. My writing is always a trick to see if I can confuse the reader into listening to the album. If I don't send you to the music, my writing has failed.

FANTASY REVIEW

The following writing was improvised while listening to Levitation 1 without a thought for publication. This is where the music took me. I shared it on Messenger, and it seemed to fit. So here it is. A good album of new music will let the listener explore the process of music in new ways. A great album of new music will transport the listener to heaven.

If listeners aren't carried away to Heaven, I'm failing.

—La Monte Young

Here is the "fantasy" review:

I am listening to Levitation 1. There is a sea of music. This sea is the source of music. There are streams in the water of pure colors and there are bubbles of many sizes. I have thought of this water as the source of music, but as I see it now the water seems to object. A voice in my head seems to feel slighted by that label. I hear the interjection, “Labels!” The voice says it as dirty word. This is music all by itself and it is beautiful. If this is the DNA of music, then what is music? What I see and feel here, and certainly all my ears can hear, is beautiful. I don’t want to speak at the banks of this sea. There is too much beauty here always and nothing that can be improved by commentary or category or any such simplification.

I watch two great musicians seeming to float over the waters with colorful lights and other sights swirling around them. I can see that all they hear inside themselves can be seen here  and as they approach each other the clouds of lights and colored shapes reach out to each other. I am watching a temporary melding of musics into a greater whole. Their bodies dance above the water, and they dive below. When one of them separates, the sound of loneliness and isolation fills the air above the water, and when they come together the musics play together as puppies, or clouds, or children, or dancing lights and colorful clouds.

I do my best to find the category to fit this beauty, but I have no word for this. So soon I find the two voices become a multitude that I hear as just one. That snippy voice in my head whispers its wisdom: “Relax. It’s just music.” Somehow this statement makes me want to cry. It is as though I had never relaxed before. I am not making a sound, but somehow I become part of the music. The voice says, “Yes!” And I realize that I am part of all the music I have ever heard, and all the music in the world has only ever been inside me! All I hear, and all I feel, and the voice in my head, and the swirling lights and colorful streams glowing in the sea, and the glowing mist are all Music and they are mine.

For a moment, I am suspended between these master musicians. I can feel the sound all around me. It is ALL emotional, EVERY note, all silence harmony, cadence, cascade, and every sound surround me. I feel the music, and what I feel IS the music. In my thoughts, I ask the musicians how they know what to play, and they just smile. The answer comes to me that the music is written in the lights and water and mist and ice and streams in this sea of discovery. For a laugh, each musician points to the other one and they both laugh. That is a joke because it isn’t true. Neither of them is leading. Both are following. Both are “reading” the music in everything all at once.

And I feel so much love. I feel loved. I am the very center of this experience, and the musicians treat me with the greatest respect. I feel that I am somehow the most important part of this whole experience. I am so moved by this. I am not used to being treated this way. All my emotions are treated with respect. All I feel is respected and it somehow becomes part of the Music. No, that’s not quite right. Everything I feel IS the music.

A very wise cloud of sound winks at me at this point and I get wisdom somehow silently spoken inside me: “The Listener is all is where the music goes. The only music you hear is in the quality of your own listening.” Wow! I am loved! I realize that I don’t know how to feel this much of Music for long. I resolve to learn to listen more. The cloud says, “No learning. Just let go! Learn to forget all that. The Music is enough.” I see that my Master Musicians have become the notes and nothing more and they are alive in me and they have always been there.

When I have been at the Sea of Music long enough, it is time to step away, but I am not the same person anymore. I am the keeper of the Music. I have become “The Listener.” My soul expands. Music has become my words for all the indescribable things. For the first time, I know for certain that there are indescribable things in me that matter. I can’t say what they are, but I know they are a better part of me.

I always feel good after listening to Levitation 1. I feel closer to who I am. I am become a cloud of meaningful experience, wisdom and love that is the very source of me in this world. You only see a part of me. I had forgotten there was a part of me that is only mine to see, and hear, and know. My day goes better. I can choose differently. I have become a cloud in trousers.

EXTRA CREDIT

The following are all comments I made to Kevin Kastning about Levitation 1 in Messenger texts while I went through two bouts of Covid 19 in three months and other annoying distractions before launching this website. They were posted at his page with my permission, and looked for all the world as a pretty well formed review to me. Once again, these comments were made as a personal comment and not intended as a review. So I wasn't lying, or trying to sound smart. That's just what I felt at the time while texting on Messenger. 

Here are the texts:

Levitation I has become my morning music. It starts my day off open to the unexpected magic and humanity in every breath. This collaboration is a forging together of two distinct languages with subtle tonal variations and tendencies combined into one new voice — and that voice is chock full of hope and humanity. This is not an oil and water combination. This metamorphosis of two into one reminds me of the title of Raymond Carver’s book of poems: “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.” There is melody everywhere in this doubly improvised ascension. I am quite sure neither of these artists are creating these songs, but rather both composers are following the song as it is revealed to each. Same as it ever was. I hear a line of Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking: “Learn by going where I need to go.” I feel this album as a duet between precise, sparse and practical magic, as though the meticulous language of Raymond Carver and the hothouse flowers of Theodore Roethke’s deeply moving praise for life had been pranked into metamorphosis by impish Ovid into the story we all need to hear right now around a camp fire. If asked for a comparison of these artists, I would say they can be compared to sparse Raymond Carver and transcendent Theodore Roethke combined and reborn by mischievous Ovid into temporary song. Since those three have yet to put out an album of their own, I can recommend Levitation I as the next best thing.

I love this album. I think the combination is amazing. Gardony may hem Kastning in a bit, in that he may have a greater tendency to keep hold onto a key signature more than Kastning might unfettered, but that tension is glorious.

There is a little bit of a Lennon and McCartney type struggle. “It’s getting better all the time (It can't git no worse).” It’s just wonderful. Of course, I don’t give a damn what is intended, and as with Kastning's other work, there is little time for intention to raise its ugly little head. Something new is created in this collaboration and it isn’t under control at all.  Damn fine album!

I fantasize that both artists were experiencing the album as it happened much as I am feeling when I listen to it. Kastning must have had an underlying joy in the discovery that this music had taken over and didn’t need any help along the way! A good collaboration commandeers intension into an uncontrollable metamorphosis. I love describing that. The power of Kevin Kastning’s music is that it can be moving, dazzling, and entertaining while calling into question everything I had known about the source of creativity and moment-to-moment experience of creation itself.

Here’s a revelation: The silence after Levitation I is poignant and electric with possibilities. That bird singing over there, the backfire of a truck on the highway, the subtle sound of wind through the trees, all sound and silence, at this moment support the soloist of that Magpie nearby. I dare say I would not have heard or understood this natural and man-made symphony unaided by the music that came before.

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That's all folks! If you made it this far, I consider you a friend. Thank you! Now, please head over to listen to the music on whatever platform you like best.

The companion "interview" is linked immediately below:

Interview of Laszlo Gardony

KEVIN KASTNING

Kevin Kastning Official Website

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LASZLO GARDONY

Sunnyside recording artist

Berklee Professor of Piano

www.LGJazz.com

www.facebook.com/LaszloGardony

www.youtube.com/lgjazzvideos

www.instagram.com/laszlogardonymusic 

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