This is church music. This is what I thought to myself as soon as I had channeled the forces from the rivers of Lapland into the circuits of my CD-player, spinning this disc of binary information through the ghostly space of the laser box, where encoded information rises in the cold laser moonlight as beauty of the ether, magically – a task that could not be performed, had not Albert Einstein received his E = mc² vision!

Yes, this is church music… and the church is the starry canopy of terrestrial night, where the spirit flows in communion with the mystery of light, your nerve ends, as Allen Ginsberg says, connected “to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”.

Yes, this is church music the same way Beethoven’s Late String Quartets are church music, or like J. S. Bach’s Suites for Violoncello are; both sets secular works that are much more church music than any church music per se…
This church is the mystery of the space-time continuum and the vibrations of life through us, as we travel our bodies, which are body-vehicles, through our consecutive lives, in pearly, glimmering beads of lives through time. We can be happy, for like The Incredible Stringband once said: “This song has no ending!”

I like CDs with just one track. This means something, this usually tells me that I’m in for a journey of spiritual significance, of possible revelations and visions, and at the very least some sort of soaring, hovering weightlessness – call it meditation, call it introspection; call it even massage – for these beautiful timbres reach your anatomy by a massage of your tympanic membranes, which transform the delicate wave-form compressions of the atmosphere into electric currents, having YOU recreate – actually CREATE! – this elegance, this humble brilliance of tone, inside your world, attuning you to higher levels of perception, and thereby to higher levels of existence, towards purity, towards a calmness of the mind.

This is the magic of Maria de Alvear’s FUERZAS, entrusted to Christina Fong, whom I love dearly for her playing, because you cannot play like this if you’re not a beautiful and loveable being; a spirit traveling forwards and upwards, a spirit who has traveled innumerable lives in consecutive body-vehicles, and who will at some point reach a level of complete spirituality, when the vehicles will no longer be needed. This is how she plays! Outstanding, marvelous! If you thirst for the presence of the Secret, this is the time to do so and cry. The combined, merged intuition of Maria de Alvear and Christina Fong reach this almost dangerous intimacy with the core of life.

I’ve known so many people, I’ve seen so many fates, I’ve been so many places, I’ve had so many years just in this life – and a music like this, straight out of timelessness into timelessness, sort of sums it all up, and I can’t believe that anyone – any composer or musician – can determine this willfully, by directed intellectual efforts, intentions or calculations, but I think instead that this is bestowed on and mediated, conveyed by beings of the right sensitivity and the right humbleness at the right level of their spiritual growth, which I believe is what happened in this almost indecently pure and spacious recording, engineered by Glenn Freeman, who with the growing output of OgreOgress productions has achieved an important, honorable position in contemporary music and art, much, I think, a result of the unusual policies of the company, solidly resting on humanitarian convictions and a respect for the fellow man that you rarely find anywhere, least of all in the recording business. Of course this too is a property of the circumstances around this little group of people in Grand Rapids, which has made the diffusion of a remarkable series of recordings possible over the last few years.

There is hope in these kinds of occurrences, though sparse and rare. OgreOgress and its people represent a more valuable imprint on our culture and time than they, most likely, realize themselves. For me they represent and build hope, by their attitude as much as by these wondrous recordings, of which Maria de Alvear’s FUERZAS is the latest, and one which caught me by surprise with its immensely forceful power of spiritual transformation.

Now I’m going to have to search the web to se what more I can find of this composer, who by FUERZAS has won my heart completely.

I’ll let a poem by Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf (1907 – 1968) round off this text in a feeling of introspective outlook, in Swedish and then in my English interpretation: