This does seem to have an overly meager beginning, with just a few hits at the keys, monotonous – but all the listener needs is a small measure of patience. Carpenter adds to this single, repeated chord, extending the figure a little, having it grow overtones and a richness of timbres, more in the likeness of an electrified harp or an amplified Iraqi oud, and, yes, the music takes on an Eastern fragrance, of the Middle East or the Indian Subcontinent.
The clusters of tones that sprinkle out like water over a lawn starts a mimicry of a sitar being strummed again and again, and soon you’re lost in this embellished meditation, which also carries an undertone of eroticism. It is very beautiful, very persuasive, magically losing itself in a haze of tonal colors that fall around you like fainting spells.
Again, like in Carpenter’s Deep Golden Flourish, he has this rare atmosphere in common with Norwegian guitarist and tape recorder experimentalist Askild Haugland.
At the conclusion of Second Presencing you’re in a fairytale of colors and innumerable golden little bells that ring.

This nine minute excerpt of a longer work is faded in to a full fledged soundscape of multiple layers of long drones, some stable, some shifting position, some stopping to breath, some eternal – and it is very dreamy, visionary, elusive, with nothing really substantial or palpable to touch and grip.
After a while dark glissandi fall through the ether, only to rise again, and then fall again; a bass tone that rocks the world in heaving decks, tilting hardwood planes under a sky that is full of jet exhaust in a complex patterns of white lines, the visitors of the continents adrift, as is the music adrift in a gliding motion, like that eternal party in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy; serpentines and colorful drinks and a monotonous, automatic chatter, drug-stuffed bodies, almost dead, going through the motions…

I have already, in another Music of Transparent Means text, made comparisons to The Great Learning Orchestra of Stockholm, and also with some works by Cornelius Cardew. I must say that this work sometimes reminds me of Cardew, and perhaps especially his Paragraph 3 of The Great Learning.

This music may seem dull to the untrained or unwilling ear, but as you listen, worlds of sound reveal themselves as subtle changes unfold, one after the other, in a spiral movement out through the ether. I wonder if music like this would have been conceivable without forerunners like Cornelius Cardew, La Monte Young or Harry Bertoia.

Now this is a really special piece indeed, performed on a number of glasses and a couple of bowed guitars. Perhaps I may compare it to works by Denis Dufour (Bocalises), Meredith Monk (Our Lady Of Late) or Annea Lockwood (The Glass World) – but this is still on another scale, with this whole wine glass ensemble!
The sound is, as you may imagine, a brittle and intense ringing, with so much tension and minuscule bending between the microtones that it has been hard to record without some static; you need utterly expensive microphones for this! The idea is wonderful, and the icy timbres are too. I wish I’d been there! This would make a fantastic video, and I suppose the ensemble has recorded the event visually too.

This group of glass wizards paints a sound of stillness and… silence; the sounds of silence. This really rises out of matter itself, out of the atomic jitter of the minerals.

Mountain Piece is another arbitrary and self-indulgent will of stubbornness! Wow! All these tom-toms all together in uneven beats sound like a slightly amplified rain on corrugated steel; a hell of a downpour, but slightly slowed-down, so you can detect individual drops hitting!
This piece also reminds me a lot of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, in which all the metronomes are started at the same instant, but then, after twenty minutes or half an hour stopping one by one, so that the sound gradually thins out, in the end leaving you with just one ticking metronome which has your total attention till the end.
Mountain Piece also thins out after a while in the same manner. I really wish I’d get the opportunity to hear the whole piece, instead of this short excerpt.

Husk opens on the most beautifully modal notes; a leaky, tarnished Dutch barrel organ from the 19th century, the tones unevenly spaced in bulging layers, expanding and contracting vis-à-vis each other – and here The Music of Transparent Means surely sound just like The Great Learning Orchestra and some work by Gavin Bryars, not unlike The Sinking of the Titanic. This environment is soap bubble transparent, soap bubble light, full of convex reflections of the world, of your back yard!

In music like this the ensemble outdoes itself! The bowed guitars make for sliding glissandi transformations, seamlessly transporting you from green to turquoise, from purple to lilac, from dream to hallucination and back…
I must object to the duration of Husk. It’s just seven minutes in this excerpt. I need to listen to this for at least one hour. Pauline Oliveros must be sent a copy! She’d be amazed over at Deep Listening!

A rough build-up (build-down…) of scorching soot tones, as if run through an old-time fuzz-box that has survived arson, adds timbre after gray timbre in this densifying matter-music, raw and ghastly, like a crowd of hoarse foghorns in a poem by Alvin Curran! I'm sure Zoë Barry has a lot to do with this!
Yet, another vision out of these sounds is a huddling group of high-voltage transformer stations, whispering in amperes and volts about their battle strategies, like American football players before kick-off.
Emerging Like an Infant From the House of Truth is granular synthesized growls of black bears and ton after ton of gravel being unloaded from dump trucks at a Baltic harbor.
A friend of mine – sound poet and painter Hebriana Alainentalo – once recorded a dredger outside the Swedish West Coast town of Varberg. It reminds me of this too. Anything that can raise so many illustrious visions in your mind must be worth something. I love this!

The second version of Emerging Like an Infant From the House of Truth appears a little less rough from the outset, a little, just a little more polished, and I detect almost melodious insertions in the haze of static sounds, like a church organ heard at a distance, through a steelworks… or perhaps placed somewhere in a corner of a giant, smoky, dusty hall of a half-kilometer long rolling-mill, the organ tones speaking of redemption and forgiveness in this carnage of metal and frustrated creation, this furious molding of matter.
I get a feeling similar to that which Gilius van Bergeijk brought me in his formidable Over de Dood en de Tijd back in the 1980s. That is a huge compliment to the members of Music of Transparent Means. I don’t have to attach the compliment to Bergeijk. This CD is a wonder unto itself, and if it gives a proper image of The Ensemble of Music of Transparent Means, I will want to hear much, much more of them!