Al Margolis is a man of the utmost creative fantasy, which this compelling music of dreams proves beyond any doubt. Apparently he surrounds himself with wise friends too, who pitch in with design etcetera. The look of this CD alone immediately catches one’s attention, which you can see above! Magnificent! Dreamy! Yes, hallucinatory! We thank Matt Schickele for that!

Also, you don’t often find a contemporary art music CD which relates heavily to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but this does, setting the atmosphere for the music that evolves, making it quite clear that the sounds emerge out of a Bardo journey, i.e. the transitional period between death and rebirth, when, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Tibetan Buddhism, scarecrows out of our own mind try to steer us off the road towards enlightenment by instilling fear in us.

3 Out if 4 Ain’t Bad for three pianos and tape, with the subtitle In Absentia, opens the set with some rumbling, rolling chords of the pianos, very much akin to the heavier parts of La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano. But this is immediately dissolved into a hazy, foggy environment of hesitant, careful piano treads out of a closed-down Mid Western bar on a backdrop of tiny bells and a murmuring barrage of thunder or war or dark thoughts… and yes, this is what dark thoughts, gloomy ruminations, must sound like in the Bardo! That is where dream and though become sound, become matter, in an instant materialization of spirit realms, to get you off your track!

Margolis, in his manipulation of the sounds of his ensemble, manages to lure you way into this foreign, but somehow eerily familiar soundscape of dark shadows and brittle points of light.

Some ways into the threatening underworld of mind you could swear someone is beating hell out of a toy piano, and if I look hard into the sounds I find John Cage smiling otherworldly at me in flashes of ebony and ivory!

Electronic treatment of the echoes of war, or the gravel under a 19th century carriage carrying Honoré de Balzac from the inn to his quarters, is laid out in crunchy, murky layers of audio, through which the Cage toy instrument still plings, at times even taking the fore in brilliant beads of tin soldier hyper keyboarding!

The fragile chords sometimes transform into the vibrations of big bells, and yet again sound like lithophones, struck slabs of rock, attuned according to the secrets of jittery minerals at the core of matter. I take this all in with all my senses, even to the extremes of smelling the smoke of rock as it is being cut in the quarry!

PR-DR for 2 manipulated percussionists starts ever so soft, spreading Stockhausenesque gamelan audio left and right, until deep murmurs bend your tympanic membranes inwards, as your eyes turn in hypnotic manifestations towards your nose tip.

It gets more industrial, but in a sparse, transparent workshop soundscape, through which the listening floats like a weightless point of abstraction, totally aware of everything without caring, without attachment, without fear or hope – and it is beautiful to be liberated inside these sounds, without the slightest cough from the welding in the hazy hall of illusory existence… and remember, the CD is about transition, from life to life by way of death; a death that exists only in the state of mind called Bardo… and this is what Al Margolis’s music here is all about!

I take short breaks to stroll over to the TV set in another room, to see if the barrage on Baghdad has commenced for the second night, and I grab a coffee on the way, only to return to the grave barrage of Margolis’s music, having the computer tremble on the verge of a hard disk crash in a percussive manipulation that takes you into a dark hall of the city of Necropolis, where the illusion of Grand Death appalls you like old dog breath of a German Shepherd on a police leash…

Ah, let me tell you, six minutes before the end of this piece you feel like you are being dragged roughly along a crude, cold mortar wall from the 1940s, bleeding from your cheek, leaving DNA-traceable graffiti behind for the living to analyze, for times to come, for the hereafter, for coming generations to build history and faith on… starting meandering traditions that fall down the decades, the centuries, spilling over into brooding, melancholy stories of folklore across the pages of books in libraries on the outskirts of towns not even planned…

The CD-leaflet holds these quotes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead:

Coincidence follows coincidence in such a way that the word coincidence looses its meaning. Al Margolis’s Tripping India is a link in that chain for me; a chain that started one day at the police station of my home town in rural Sweden, where I earn my living. Some lady had donated a large amount of her deceased husband’s library to the police authority. Since no one knew what to do with the donation, the books were simply stashed away into a remote corner of the archives in the basement, where I spent a good deal of my working hours sifting through the donation. I found a book that interested me a lot, about after-death experiences, written by an American doctor of medicine.

Somewhat later, but directly connected to my find of that police basement book, none other than Karlheinz Stockhausen urged me to acquire and study the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I did, right away, by way of Amazon. This really carried me way into the world of Tibetan Buddhism, where I found lectures by Dalai Lama and Sogyal Rinpoche, and I had the most vivid visions in a hut way up in Swedish Lapland, at the Tarfala mountain station, where I was left all by myself, by chance, for a few days in a mist that didn’t rise, making hiking impossible. As I lay there in the hut, flat on my back, resting for two days, with just mist and rocks all around, the only sound the calving glaciers up around the valley, thoughts inside me rose into vivid materializations, and all kinds of people and animals from my life came visiting in wake dreams, like my dog Kim from the 1950s and my cat Izzi from the 1980s, delivering messages of the utmost importance. It was, I imagine, like a bardo journey, this mountain experience, or like resting in a think tank, with all outer stimuli cut off, leaving the stage for the impulses rising out the unconscious.

Indeed this chain of events has changed me. I feel content that this illusionary life is but one in a chain of perhaps millions of lives, that death as we see it does not exist, and that I can take it more easy than before. I used to get really nervous if something went wrong with the computer, but my friends can attest to my unusual cool when my ADSL recently went down for a good two weeks! Hehe!

This CD, with its sounds straight out of that same world, and with the above quotes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is the latest link on that chain of coincidences, which are no coincidences. You name it, we like it!

The last part of the CD is Tripping India; the title track, defined as an audio travelogue, with manipulated percussionists.
Stuttering martial drumscapes stomp out the landscape in thunderclaps of steel, countered by shrill incisions of church bells or thinned-out tam tams from the Paiste factory in Switzerland…
The chanting of voices deep down in this dream plea for sanity in a state of mind on the brink; a spiritual existence in a slingshot ‘round the periphery of a tilted plane of glass through the ages: sand and glass and the tents of the Bedouins in Jordan; the shrill sound of bronze mortars and the tempting smell of cardamom in the cold desert night.

There is nothing like cruise missiles across the desert, these latter-day spears billowing along the inconsistencies of the topography; there’s nothing like embedded reports from mud wall villages along the Tigris; and the sky stands silent above the havoc, like the true nature of mind, unattached…

This last work on If, Bwana’s CD Tripping India is surely the most visionary, the most intriguing, bringing the listener into sound worlds of many colors, many smells and tastes, not unlike the formidable Sune Karlsson’s Megemetentelosis, which you may listen to at his mp3-page:
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/509/sune_karlsson.html
Be sure to hear it!

Al Margolis has worked down the same line of intuitive tendencies, layering the experiences in the same mirage manner, applying complete atmospheres with his brush of worldly and otherworldly sonics, taking you along the silk route from China and Mongolia, towards the minarets and the spaceship mosques of Istanbul; these awesome expressions of faith embellished with the most outstanding mosaics.

If you’re interested in more meditative, introspective Bardo musics, you should perhaps also listen to my own piece Stuor Reaiddavaggi, available for listening and downloading at mp3.com, at the address:
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/507/ingvar_loco_nordin.html
Just scroll down the list. It’s number 18 from the top!