Time Transfixed:

The Momentary Music of Hemisphere

“My desire was not to compose, but to project sounds into time, free from any compositional rhetoric. Music which specifically defined pitch but allowed the temporal dimension to remain indeterminate, thus creating a sonic world where each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual sound world.”

Morton Feldman

To become transfixed is to be rendered motionless with wonder, to be immobilized by astonishment. To some extent it touches upon the condition which in more classical eras was associated with what was known as the sublime, a state akin to awe. The sublime is still with us of course, but it is often sublimated after the course of modernism conducted its now well known radical discontinuity. This was especially the case in the domain of music, which is a durational art, one occurring strictly as momentary sonic situations, relying historically on the laws of harmony in order to sooth the savage breast. The aleatory and organic flow of what became known as ‘new music’ however, tended to naturally embrace dissonance in a manner which celebrates time transfixed. If we try to imagine the notion of time transfixed we can also determine how frozen time might amount to space itself: to hear and see them as one in the same quantum thing, or in Zen terms, no-thing.

In the wake of 20^th Century innovators such as Henry Cowell, John Cage and Cecil Taylor, for whom tone clusters were as natural an occurrence as seashells on a beach of silence, contemporary composers and performers have become quite adept at inviting us to an inner sanctum of sounds. This realm is one in which time itself can almost become transfixed by its own passage through our space and where we the listeners can be become equally transfixed by the beauty of moments which are allowed to arrive and decay in a natural manner. To some degree reminiscent for me of the seminal achievement of American composer Michael Nyman in his influential work called Decay Music, in which notes are allowed to arrive and dissolve like sugar in water, the newly released momentary music called Hemisphere allows us to dream while being awake. And our shared dream consists of the thirteen brilliant compositions on this splendid new disc.

Created by a gifted Scandinavian trio consisting of Karin Johansson: piano and prepared piano; Paul Jarret: guitar and prepared guitar; and Donovan Von Martens: double bass, Hemisphere (Havtorn Records) is an illuminating walk across that sublime beach of silence, one where we are constantly aware of the powerful audio tides which remove our footsteps as soon as they are taken. Recorded and mixed by Martin Ohman at Skogen Studio, Osterbymo, and mastered by Linus Andersson at Elementstudion, Gothenberg, Hemisphere is highly meditative music, the kind I can comfortably identify as what I call sonic satori (the use of sound as a means of liberation and illumination associated with zazen practice). I can also readily concur with the astute Gothenberg critic Magnus Haglund, who clearly designates their highly structured and yet loosely improvised ensemble playing as a form of painting with sound, in which figure and ground become synonymous.

Karin Johansson, Paul Jarret, Donovan Von Mertens.

Equally mind-opening is the aural realization, or remembrance, that each musician on Hemisphere is essentially playing a related stringed instrument, one which resonates distinctly and differently, almost in a sustained spiritual echo, with the other players in both time and space. Less a formal group than a constellation of players in which each has entered the temporary orbit of the others, this trio (what composer Morton Feldman would likely call triadic voices) feels effortless in its achievement of a unique ambience of mind, one perfect for the practice of breathing. The opening track, “Clariseme/Clarity”, for instance, with its halting beauty hovering in front of us, is a fine example of this contemplative practice, since the notes themselves arrive and depart (precisely on time by the way) with a haunting similarity to the actual tentative loosening of our thoughts, unmoored so to speak, as they slowly drift away from our shores and disappear into the same ocean of silence from which they emerged. That silence would therefore be our own sonic satori, or awakening.

After establishing a coda of sorts with the ideally titled “Clarity”, with its sparse keystrokes and slowly mounting waterfall of parallel string scrapings building to a gentle frenzy of instrumental conversing, thus commences a stately procession towards a fire escape in the sky. “Det Ar Sent Nu (It’s Late Now)”, another temporal reference, almost demands an afterthought (or is it a beforethought?) such as ‘But it’s always still Now’. The long now. It has a twilight sort of tone, crepuscular in texture, one which beckons us to become still while in the midst of its active allure. That persistent allure, which is consistently sustained as the procession proceeds, often appears to conceal, or perhaps camouflage, a secret storm of sorts. It is a secret storm, brewing just beneath the surface of the aptly titled “Tilden/The Time”, which often threatens to burst at the sonic seams, except that the only existent seams would be those in a poised listener.

As with “The Time”, “The Murmuring of Birds” (which is one of my favourites from this disc) is also about allowing the temporal dimension to remain indeterminate, while also allowing each instrument to live out its own individual life in its own individual sound world. It’s a lovely and elegant reminder of a perennial question: what kind of music, if any at all, serves the environmental purpose of establishing the mind-body equilibrium sought after by all meditators? Well, to begin with, the kind featured on Hemisphere. Personally, I’ve long used sound as an ideal accompaniment for concentration on the breath, which is in itself a kind of reverberating music created by our own lungs. Putting on a piece of music in order to facilitate meditation also provides us with a set formality and a ritual pattern, within which one can briefly forget all limits. Indeed, it’s almost as if it’s the music itself which is doing the meditating, through us.

In addition, one extra subtle gift is the reminder of the other meaning of ‘murmuration’, which references the way a flock of birds appears to move instantly in the same direction, as if they shared a single mind (which of course they do). Similarly, a prime example of this trio operating as a single structural unit, or flock, is also evident on “Strings”, which has an overlapping motif focusing on the inherent string-aspect of each of the three instruments employed by these highly attuned intuitive musicians. “Strings”, like all the compositions on Hemisphere, functions best as a meditation that measures the passing of time, and also re-unminds us of how Stockhausen once employed the attractive term intuitive music to characterize his orchestral direction that “performers should only play notes when they are not thinking about their playing.”

The results are just as liberating as they are imaginative, since they do indeed eliminate multiple limits, both inside and out. Ironically, this compositional territory was also explored much earlier by the French iconoclastic Erik Satie during the last years of the 19^th Century, with his majestically simple pieces that he termed furniture music, a stylistic device which suggests music that is simply part of the room in which it is being played, just like a chair or a table. Hemisphere too is a distinctly intuitive music in its form, content, and the subtle shapes it induces between the ears of the behearer. “Shadow Song” is an ideal example of this phenomenon, with its meandering pluckings and soft insinuation of an amorphous theme, a shadowy theme. Like Satie, the trio behind Hemisphere also takes silence as the origin and starting point for all sound content.

From the moment one places their CD in its chamber and hits play, it strikes me there is very little else to do but to meditate, in whatever shape or form you might choose to define it. Their music takes over the space and time in which you hear it in a manner that Satie would have adored: it’s there but then again it isn’t. It’s everywhere. And this fluid trio, so proficiently in flux with itself, manages to extract a certain shimmering here and nowness, almost the wow of a very long now, from the cadence and cascade they invite us to experience. Indeed, it is a meditative musical now, one that accurately measures time. Concluding with “Sphere”, the secret storm beneath the surface subsides. It is precisely as such a movie soundtrack of the inner cosmos that an effective use of music as a contemplative tool allows us to view sonic paintings with our ears the way this one showcases its collaborative aural canvas.

Echoing the esteemed Mr. Feldman, he of the throbbing triad, these three talented musicians project sounds into time, in a open-form manner which is definitely free of compositional restraints. I would even affirm that all music, and especially the kind as conducive to meditation as this new album of sonic moments created by Johansson, Jarret and Von Martens, is actually a kind of frozen time anyway, one which slowly melts in our listening mind. In a splendid way, there are three hemispheres operating in elegant meditative alignment here: composition, improvisation and performance. Flow: theirs is a state of optimal awareness. One might even say that their evocative music momentarily fuses our two brain hemispheres together rather seamlessly. In fact, I just did.