This trio – for short GaMaRa – comes out of wildly disparate traditions; South Indian percussion, contemporary music (so called New Music) and jazz. The result of these musicians’ meeting is stunning in musicality, beauty and excitement. The booklet text says that they all share “a musical culture and aesthetic that is based on a love of the raw material of music: sound.” The text goes on to explain that, though they honor traditions, they also feel obliged to create a music that is of the Now and the Here. It is not, though, at all in the vein of so-called World Music, which, at times, can be rather pretentious and boring.

Track 1 – Twenty Fingers – involves, I’d guess, Goldstein and Anandan. Ganesh Anandan kicks off with percussion, at first lightly wooden, soon in deeper, darker bounces and with the added rattling of a tambourine. Goldstein provides the lineage of a melody of sorts, or, perhaps, more to the point, a lucid, gluey, elastic progression of sounds from his violin.
The piece transforms itself from its calm and abiding beginnings to a frantic percussive-violinist crossfire that blows you away.
The sound is very good, i.e., the recording technique, applied by Dino Giancola of DeTour Sound Studio in Montreal, is splendid! The dynamics are staggering.
This first piece really swings, and for sure there are clearly Southern Indian influences weighing heavily here. The last half a minute sports a thin, wrangling and ascetic solo figure by Goldstein, like a vanishing tail of a lizard under the leaves.

Track 2 is called Dream Algebra.
A speedy vibrating sound – as if from a freely played double bass; perhaps the prepared guitar? – is joined by Goldstein’s penetrating violin and some metallic Anandan percussion. The music moves upwards, then downwards, in a repeated pattern; waves through the music, a slow swell with a glittering, grainy surface; sounds that reflect and are reflected; short remains of sound in an overall motion that is long and slow, thus enabling the experience of rhythmic motions wide apart, in the same moment sensing the frantic and the meditative.
Thin metallic spheres – like Christmas balls – roll and bop (and bounce like Glenn Gould’s blue rubber balls that roll out of the speakers when he plays the Two- and Three-Part Inventions) over Goldstein’s violin gratings. It’s a flickering sensation, Goldstein slowing down gradually, turning golden leaves over. A soft whispering rumble provides the backdrop for the last, shallow violin etchings…

Voyage en train sits at track 3.
A soft drumming and a very clean sound of the violin – and something else, perhaps a metallophone of some kind – makes this almost sound electronic, electro-acoustic, though it really is just as acoustic (well, there is a prepared guitar that may have some device attached; I don’t know) as everything else on this CD of gleaming, shining, brilliant improvisations.
The beat, dark brown, muffled, keeps up, while the violin sweeps in gracious motions that reach all over the soundscape in wide arches. The metallic sounds – which I now believe in fact come from Rainer Wiens’ prepared guitar, renders this music a good part of its very special and somewhat shady, dreamy character.
Intensity once again picks up, Goldstein gets down into his catharsis of minuscule, glittering, grainy details of amassed sounds on the violin, as Wiens’ electrified (?) guitar preparations round off this tender piece in a bleached down reflection of the spectralism of Iancu Dumitrescu or Horatio Radulescu.

Track 4 is RaMa, presumably indicating that it is a duo by Malcolm Goldstein and Rainer Wiens, i.e. guitar and violin.
Indeed it begins in a jingling kind of spirit that could as well be some metal percussion as a guitar, but I presume it’s the jingle jangle picking of Wiens’ preparations, in a sensation that is submerged in one way or another, submarine, wobbly, floating, suspended – and it is starkly beautiful.
Malcolm Goldstein’s violin cuts in with a dreamy, turned-away growl that rises as out of a hoarse cat’s throat, and suddenly I hear sounds that are identifiable as guitar sounds, sometimes even remembering some early 1950s’ Les Paul twangs… but only very loosely associated, I might add.
The guitar is closely miked, one way or another, really sitting there right up front, in your face, and the violin is dry as a desert, sharp as a blistering sand storm, cutting the atmosphere in fine shreds of audio that probes different states of mind along the way… and now moaning, shrieking and whirling like a sudden whirlwind through fall leaves, shaking all little microbes around…
Wiens turns his prepared guitar into a horse load of tin cans tumbling down the alley, while Goldstein’s violin rises above it all in curving fireworks and witches’ whistles.
Calmer situations mount above the horizon and pass you by, swaggering, in the corner of one’s eye, as layers of stillness are outlined by a violin that gets hoarser and hoarser, until the stillness shapes turn into fiery contours of burning Bristol terraces, curving slightly above the city in a pale November of goodbyes…

Track 5 is the longest of the pieces at nine minutes. It’s called Foreign Tongues.
The instrument that Ganesh Anandan – I suppose – uses, sounds like a blown shell of sorts, growling and moaning and mumbling, but it also resembles some rough reed instrument.
I kind of miss a detailed description of not too obvious instruments, and I’d also like a detailed account of instruments used in each piece. That always makes listening more educational.
The piece sounds like nothing else really, so maybe I shouldn’t bother trying to describe it, but I’ll do it anyway. The constant, almost verbal, certainly very expressive and exclamatory, monologous blowing of this mysterious shell-like instrument is accompanied by a see-saw violin, as the piece staggers along through an age-old dreamscape that feels a bit noisy, almost like hearing a really loud shehnai; you know, that Indian oboe that cuts right through like a heartache…

Track 6 is simply called Up North, but I wonder what North we’re talking about here. The trio appears in the cold North of a Montreal winter in the picture on the cover, and I’m right smack in the inconvenient middle of a much to early, hard winter of Sweden when writing this at the end of November, my only real consolation a kitten called Shanti that I just brought home to get some company in this desolate spot.
The rubbing of some frame drum – I think… - gets things moving, and peculiar, innovative guitar sounds tingle and trickle along. Corrugated spurs of withheld metallics embellish their duration, also giving a fair sense of direction and velocity.

The thumb-piano-like wobbling audio that comes in different pitches along with the scratching of a drum skin brings you into a serene, mysterious, hypnotic mood. It is very persuasive indeed. This is probably one of the most original passages on this CD, although, I admit, there are many very original stretches in these pieces of music! The textures are often rich in combinations of tempi, i.e. fast and close sounds in an overarching, slower breathing, and if you’re a good listener or perhaps a practitioner of meditation, you can enjoy those tempi simultaneously. There is something of Saami music and a tingling feeling of Northern Lights in this particular piece, so maybe the trio thought about that kind of north when they decided the title. Someone knows…

Track 7 has the title Fra Ma Ga Ra, indicating that there is an additional player here; Frank Lozano on saxophone.
This starts in a mighty manner, not unlike Japanese Gagaku, heavily stomping forward with a lot of wheezing in the process. Anandan provides some wonderfully suspended wind chime sounds, while Frank Lozano lets his saxophone imitate some of Goldstein’s husky violinisms. Rainer Wiens tickles his guitar most seriously, up there in country & western heaven – until Goldstein hits home with a fractured and worn violin voice that cracks and coughs and splinters.
The combined forces of this heavy foursome achieve overwhelming expressive power, but in the thinner moments that they also allow, you can rest in a serene, misty but elusive trance… Goldstein offers his winding, smoky tone to the divine powers of the spheres. Incense sound belches out of his violin like smoke from the chimneys that stand like endless Jehovahs across the littered horizons of industrialization… and I realize that he’s always, through all these recordings, been talking to God.

Track 8 is the last one; Lullaby.
Softly soaring thumb piano and a light Goldsteinean violin touch, a fondling fingertip sensitivity of bow across strings, instantly set you in a weightless mood of apple orchard fragrances and light skies at dusk. The thumb piano (or whatever it is that sounds like one) comes across like a music box, while the violin playing reminds me of Morton Feldman’s For John Cage.
This certainly is played with the lightest of touches, in a feeling of cool sheets pulled up under your chin. It’s time to let go, to surrender your body and your mind to the bardo of dreams, through which you will experience many wonders, that will, however, dissipate like dew in the morning sunlight when you awake to the bardo of this life, this ever-changing set of circumstances that bring you along the path of your karma – and the piece dies down into silence, or, should I say, continues indefinitely, in silence…

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