Introduction

Do go gentle into that good night

Like the last time we tried our hand at a set of liner notes, we start out messing with some famous words. This time they’re from Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet, where he’s writing on his dying father, before continuing, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day”, and then “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

    While daring to remove a word, we emphatically want to avoid a sense of setting up yet another opposite of something, a dualising framework, instead suggesting a shifting of mode, an alternate way: still burning, still open, to intensify awareness of faculties, going gentle, gentle, not only into the good night, but elsewhere; and perhaps even adding: irrespective of age.

    Being, breathing, going, coming. Coming from where?

    Of course, if you really want to look into the trail of a where, pursue it, you’ll never get there, won’t find it. So for this project we’ll choose a moment, a circa moment, a circa place, locality, call it June 17th, 2011, San Francisco, longitude 122.40897, latitude 37.78966, late evening.

    There we were, with SK in charge, first in a trio setting with our friend Theresa Wong on cello, later in an extended ensemble sort of jam. Both settings part of a larger evening, with sounds on three floors, sometimes simultaneously, all part of a fairly loose weaving reverberating through the building, through the floors, through the cracks and the lines on the walls, through … and now we’re getting a lot warmer, tampen brænder as we say in Danish, it’s literally burning: name of place, Meridian Gallery, name of SK’s heading for the evening, Meridian Xings.

    There we were, under the great wings of Anne & Tony, the gallery owners, full names rarely given, but here: Anne Trueblood Brodsky and Anthony Williams. Under their patronage and direction, the city of San Francisco has witnessed wonderful moments of sight and sound, often combined, over many years, over many obstacles, precious moments seeping into history, check the archives.

    Again, there we were, evenings of 2011, with SK as resident artist or resident composer or musi- cian, whatever his title was. And not just evenings, afternoons and even mornings as well. For here it needs to be said that Naya Buric, at that time girlfriend and now wife of SK, had come over from Denmark for an internship under the auspices of Anne & Tony, crossing the lines further.

    The gallery, its name, the crossing of lines. Speaking geographically, a meridian of course refers to a line connecting the two poles of our earth, a virtual line, that may be understood either as a circle or a half circle, a kind of verticality, a longitude, which is then crossed by another line, per- pendicularly, a latitude, which strictly speaking is not a meridian. Together they form a system, an order in which a set of ordinates will co-ordinate, marking a place, marking a point, more or less.

    These lines are pretty straight forward, sort of the Western way, a Cartesian mode, two-fold, this way, that way, clarity, distinct lines, man, nature, the inner, the outer, the infinite, the finite, the mind, the body, etc.

    The gallery, its name, some other lines. Then, still speaking geographically but now heading east, we’re running into another set of meridians, still fairly vertical (if we remain standing up), but less linear, maybe curving, like streams, likerivers, flowing, swelling, maybe being blocked, dammed up. These are the lines within us, internal geography, not physical like veins with blood, not quite virtual,

maybe an in-between, a system in between: not binary, twofold, like Western ways of cutting things; here the whole tends to come in threes, in China the Daoists will talk in terms of jing, qi, shen, something like physicality, energy,spirit or, say (there being so many ways to translate), the grosser, the subtle and the very subtle, not that clear and distinct, more interwoven.

    Before the gallery, still the name, the term. Maybe at this point it could be thrown into the mix that SK and TU, touring, recording and talking together in years prior to that evening in the gallery, had spent many hours on the subject brought up most concisely by Baruch Spinoza (Jewish philoso- pher writing in Latin, in Holland), and centuries later taken up by Gilles Deleuze (writing in French): we don’t know what a body is capable of.

    From there we had also gone into some of the themes that Deleuze had laid out, still inspired by the texts and geometry of Spinoza: internal cartographies, longitudes and latitudes, slowness and speeds, degrees of intensityand a breakdown of dualities, continuing in view of Spinoza’s one substance.

    Likewise, both of us having experienced and played in different parts of China, we had wit- nessed, and been interested in, Chinese ways of looking into this larger question, what a body is capable of, also in those pretty concrete fields, tai chi, qigong, acupuncture, internal alchemy, etc.

    The gallery, June 2011. Given the above, it may then be seen that, coming into that gallery evening, there was aleast a certain amount of awareness of, looking East, the ideas of the twelvefold meridians of the human body, the prenatal and postnatal flows, the Chinese version of the five ele- ments (with wood and metal), the trigrams, thethreefold treasures, and again, coming back West, to Holland, to France, the modes, the mappings, the motilities, attributes, affects, flightlines, longi- tudes, etc.

    At the same time it was clear that, compositionally speaking, if we were to give a certain shape to all of this, there was much too much ground to cover given the resources and time allotted at the gallery that particular evening. However, we both knew and felt: this would be something to return to.

    And in that sense, here we are. Of course, in more than one sense it could quickly become apparent that it’s still too much of a mouthful, still too much ground to traverse, too large a challenge. That may easily be. That’s part of the reason why the third word in our title reads: Toward. A longish process, ongoing. Another part would be knowing one may never get there. And also: there is not a there to get to.

    Still, here we are, inside two LPs, with what we have called four approaches, four sides of vinyl, four voices, a string quartet, four times three, the twelve meridians, sometimes called postnatal or acquired or tidal; four times two, the eight meridians named extraordinary or congenital; the two of us, in what David Bohm has called the explicate and implicate orders; Norman at the board record- ing, Andreas having filmed and delivered both Chinese rain and thunder, Nis and Nis having further explicated everything.

    Four approaches, four sides of vinyl. Approaches will refer to process, play, passage, part, piece. Compositionally, musically, maybe a little different from the traditional word “movement” pointing to a tempo, andante, largo, presto,since we’re not doing symphony. Maybe it’s closer to a suite in the sense that it was conceived as a sequence, first side before the third (on our previous recordings the order would not have been that orderly). The sides are definitely related, linked, the lines run through, but more in the sense of four possibilities out of a manifold: when we went into the studio, we had no idea, no grip on, what we would end up with (if anything).

    Four voices. Having said no idea, no grip, doesn’t go as far as the voices. We did have this idea of string quartet as in a traditional string quartet, with two violins, viola and cello. And we thought of the meridians, in the Western (geo-navigational) sense and in the Eastern sense (Daoist-alchemical) as having two voices each, with short texts (inspiringalso a recomposition, permutation later on),

by a venerable four: Deleuze, Spinoza, Sun Bu’er, Lü Yen. We’ve already tried to give a few pointers toward what we have understood of the lines connecting Deleuze (1925-1995) and Spinoza (1632- 1677). The Daoist voices alsowould be seen as sharing in a lineage, where he, Lü Yen, also known as Lü Dongbin or Ancestor Lü (b. circa 796), would figure as what they call founder or progenitor of a school, and she, Sun Bu’er (circa 1119–1182), would be treasured as a poet and practitioner of those teachings. A very well-known, short text by Ancestor Lü has come upthrough the centuries as the Hundred Character Tablet, and we have seen photographs of a stone inscribed with those characters written and to be understood in twenty lines. Since the twelve and eight meridians taken

together make twenty, and since our larger theme as laid out is toward the alchemical, from the per- spective ofwholeness, we thought we would take twenty lines from Sun Bu’er, Deleuze and Spinoza as well. Sometimes the way they count, the whole itself (the stone, the name, a heading) will count as a number, a nice reminder it seems, thus making twenty-one in all, an auspicious one in many fields. (In the studio we joked around a little bit with the textual voices and the different instru- mental voices of the string quartet, and we came up with Deleuze playing the first violin, Spinoza the second, Sun Bu’er the viola, and as the deep voice, on cello, Ancestor Lü.) Voices in non-local tongues, never easily translated, transmuted, into the local, eighty or eighty-four lines all together, here they come:

Lü Yen:

Nourishing vital energy, speechless, maintain it.

Settle your heart, do no-action.

In movement and quiet, know the origin.

Inactive, who are you seeking?

In reality, you should respond to things.

Respond to things, but don’t be attached to them.

Without attachment, your spirit will remain steady.

With spiritual steadiness, Qi returns naturally. 10  

When energy returns, elixir spontaneously crystallizes,

in the pot pairing water and fire.

Yin and yang arise, alternating over and over again,

everywhere producing the sound of thunder.

White clouds assemble on the summit,

sweet dew bathes the polar mountain.

Having drunk the wine of longevity,

you wander free, who can know you?

You sit and listen to the stringless tune,

you clearly understand the mechanism of creation.

The whole of these twenty verses is a ladder straight to heaven. 11

Being, breathing, becoming, becoming process, going, going where?

    Now, as with Dylan Thomas above, you sit with these canonical lines, in some sense over- whelmed, there’s so much to work with, so much to work on, to listen to. Still, they are not your lines, not your music, until you’ve tried to make them your own, making your very own connec- tions with them. In that attempt, in that process, you may falter. Still, you get going, see what may appear, if you dig in, stay with those constellations, outer meridians, inner meridians, modes of melodies, harmonics, ruptures, fire, waters, inks, linkings, after those four voices, what does a fifth voice, SKTU, come up with?

If a body of lines were laid out at the Meridian Gallery back in the spring of 2011, it was not until about a year later that things started to move on, when TU opened the possibility of picking up some of those threads again, proposing the title already then.TU had also suggested that I’d write for string quartet, as a way of linking up the music with the other foursomes, being like cardinal points in the work: the four voices, the four root texts, the four LP sides, the four approaches and so on.Turning to Deleuze, tuning into his thoughts on Spinoza, on speeds and slow- ness, it seemed the topography of the string instruments related to our topic, as their bodies, geographies of their own, were fields for an interplay of lines, of longitudes and latitudes, of strings and bows, intersecting in sound. A string then becoming a longitude, vertical in pitch, and points along it, sonic locations that await activation, by a finger, hand, wrist, arm, elbow, shoulder, by a body, a bow. And still with Deleuze resonating on, navigating further East, a meridian could also be seenas a melodic line that moves through a sonic landscape, shaped by it and giving shape to it, composed and recomposed, as a melody sung out by one of the four voices, with the others responding in harmony at points along its way, opening for yet another interplay between the horizontal and the vertical: the melody, weaving along, water-like, and the chords, clusters of notes stacked on top of each other, reflecting the different layers of the melodic body. Again, thatthree-fold of the grosser, the subtle and the very subtle, now sorted in layers of frequency, the grosser being the twelve well-tempered tones, roots, and the subtler being the harmonics and overtones of those twelve.And remembering that meridians are common in nature for all bodies, onecould also say fundamental, basic, prime, which seemed to be a way of establish- ing a common ground between the twelve prime meridians and the twelve well- tempered tones, being also prime in some sense; linking them up in a twelvefold of pieces, of twelve lines, each featuring a voice in the quartet.Writing those lines, I tried to listen deeply to their bottom nature. (Coinciden- tally, a poster of Pauline Oliveros was the only thing hanging on the walls whenI entered the gallery atelier in San Francisco, a local heroine around there, and elsewhere. After a few months of it just hanging there silently, Theresa Wong turned my attention to her and her concept of Deep Listening.)I also looked to another revered voice from the past, to Brother Yusef Lateef, whose musicand teachings were a strong influence on our Alphabet, Peaceful, Diminished project. Back then in 2010, Brother Yusef was still with us, playing his horns and flutes up in the woods of western Massachusetts, but since last year, not anymore, at least not locally, not in grosser form. So, there I was, going through the pages of Brother Yusef’s“Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns”, as a page of Chinese Interpolations suddenly showedup, twelve tone rows in strict symmetry, still with a nice sound to them. I improvised on them, trying to loosen up their symmetries, and before anything made too much sense I wrote it down, part random, part improvised, part sung out.

And just as things were starting to come down on paper, now writing in the spring of 2012, I got sidetracked by another familiar voice from the gallery, the Canadian composer Ann Southam. Iwas asked to perform at the Click Festival in Helsingør, and decided to give a Danish premiere of Southam’s solo piano work entitled “Simple Lines Of Inquiry”. A bold and beautiful work, which I had be- come aware of back in San Francisco. As I investigated further into it, it seemed that her lines were close in family with our work. The hour-long piece consisted of twelve parts, each starting out with a simple line that would quietly weave together these mysterious harmonies, in asort of melodic, repetitive twelve-tone language.

Between Sister Ann and Brother Yusef, the Canadian streams and the Chinese symmetries, I found a middle ground, an in-between, interpolating.

Attention was also drawn to the so-called eight extraordinary meridians, lines that were even more subtle, hidden, pre-natal, pre-instrumental, pre-well- tempered. The harmonics came into play again, as a way of toning down the fundamental twelve, and in the work in general: audible, but not right before your ears, or, right before your ears, but not audible.

Having never tried it out, I thought I’d go for an acupuncture session, in order to investigatethe workings of the meridians in my own body. A good friend had recommended Dr. Bao in Lyngby.A quiet lady, ageless in presence and very meticulous. At one point, Dr. Bao placed a stethoscope at certain points on my arm, and started hitting it with a rubber hammer while listening closely. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me she was listening for the resonance of the meridian, which she described as a low sound, like that of pulling a bass or cello string.

During all this, I had to keep in mind that the string quartet pieces were also  a starting point, a pre-set of lines awaiting new circuitry, as TU and I had talked about the possibility of mixing up the voices, alternating them, changing their velocities, still leaving space for the interplay between thetwo of us, as a duo and together with the quartet, 2+4 being yet a new constellation in the mix. So, really, during this whole time, I had more the feeling of writing toward something, toward a meeting of bodies, of strings, of texts, voices, keyboards, marble rolls and boiling water.

And being in the middle of a map, with lines already connecting various locations on the WestCoast, ved Vesterhavet, på Vesterbro, it now pointed toward Vanløse, to Village Recording, where Imet up with Andrea, Therese, Katarzyna and John, the four voices of Messerkvartetten. We recorded all the ground work, the 12+8 pieces. Still being raw mixes, they needed a good treatment, which pointed on- wards to Oakland, to New, Improved Recording, where the next phasebegan: that of stepping into the string quartet, into the map of lines laid out, or as Deleuze puts it:“One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.”12

So, here we were, TU and SK, with Norman behind the board, entering the work together, trying to take up and lay down those lines.

As mentioned earlier on, we recorded the four sides in separate sequences, as four individual approaches, starting from zero with each of them, leaving us roughly one and half days per side. Part of the structure was to create four thun- ders, one for each side, as sudden vertical strikes into the common plane of the work, with the first thunder being placed at the very beginning of side 1.

We started together at the piano, SKTU, four arms and elbows, all 88 keys, in one strike, bang. Adding layers of organ, synths, cymbals, gongs and slamming doors on top of it. By the end of day two, still building up the thunder, Norman remarked that at this point it might not even be playable on vinyl, because the needle could risk jumping out of the groove and lose its track, giving a new, unex- pected dimension to our title. Thanks to Norman, though, we stayed in the groove and moved on into the rumbling aftermath, from which the strings would grow, starting out with the first cello piece, with Ancestor Lü, which made sense from a contextual point of view, Lü being the lower end, the deeper ground, so to speak.

And if side 1 was more grounded, still not so crowded, we started intensifying things little by little, as we moved across the four sides. Adding more layers on side 2, doubling up the voices. On side 3, we began to cut it all up (to ‘yin’ it up), giving it another kind of density and speed, and on side 4 we began to expand and compress the strings, alternating the lines and changing theirvelocities. Add- ing further layers of keys, texts and voices into the mess; mixed up, pitched down, stretched out and interwoven in a kind of alchemical practice, or malpractice if you will.

And as a return to zero, a looping back to the beginning, we ended the whole thing with one last thunder, reversing it, this time letting the rumble grow out

of the voice and piano. A return to zero, full circle, also in the sense that this duo take pointed back to our very first moment of interplay, on the first piece we recorded together, back in 2007, inSeattle, on the Suddenly, Sound session, on Songline No. 1.

After the intense days in Oakland, and hosted under the warm care of Molly’s motherly cuisine, Andreas and I took off from Mount Tiburon and flew back to Copenhagen,where Nis was waiting behind his board, ready to help us tie up loose ends.

Four, twelve, eight, twenty. Open up the opus, re-assemble, dissolve, re-form, integrate. Going back into our very title of these two LPs, “Meridiana: Lines Toward A Non-local Alchemy”, we’ve already tried to give an idea of how we saw the implications of that first word, going global in the sense of seeing those lines set up to connect the poles ofour planet, how they formed a curved line, half a circle; but, of course, there’s always that other half, making it come full. And we have touched upon movement, being in play, process, becoming: the lines toward. But we haven’t yet articulated the connection, as we see it, between the first word and the last, connecting the meridians, outer and inner, to the word Alchemy. So as we see the implications of the title, the circular again comes strongly into play: the first word forming a line to the last, but re-connecting back again, and again. Perhaps bringing to mind the well-known symbol of the alchemical process, the serpent Uroboros, biting its own tail, visually indicating the ongoingness, the circular nature of the opus alchymicum, sometimes in this context also referred to as the opus circulatorium, pointing to the alchemist dissolving and coagulating the elements (fire, water, metal, etc.), again and again, distilling them, refining them, going gentle into that long night.

    Aspiring alchemists or not, we are all situated in a certain locality, a time and a place, from where we set out to work. In the following TU will try to tell his side of the work-story, gathering the four texts, sitting with the lines, the lines:

Before mentioning Bohm we see that Murphy brings up the names of Penrose and Bell, so maybe we can include a few lines from both of them, Roger Penrose first, in the book he has called “Shadows of the Mind”, where in a late page, dealing with twistor theory (and where EPR is shorthand for Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen), Penrose says:

[The] twistor theory … provides a non-local description of space-time, where entire light rays are represented as single points. It is this space-time non-locality that relates it to the quantum non-locality of EPR situations.17

Also in the good collection of essays cited above, with Prigogine, we find these lines from Penrose:

Quantum reduction must be a non-local process, and the hope is that this non-locality can be matched with the non-locality involved in the gravitational entropy concept.18

Then a couple of sentences from J.S. Bell, taken from his own book, already with a nice title, “Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics”, and ending with that core question:

Suppose that we are finally obliged to accept the existence of these correlations at long range, and the gross non-locality of nature in the sense of this analysis. Can we then signal faster than light?19

What you get from J.S. Bell himself, his language, the tonality of his writing, is something perhaps a little softer,cautious, shaped perhaps like the question above – unlike Nick Herbert, who in the book “Quantum Reality” doesn’t seem to spare the horses:

Bell’s theorem ... says that reality must be non-local. “Non-local” means ... that the atom’s measured attributes are determined not just by events happening at the actual measurement site but by events arbitrarily distant, including events outside the light cone ... Bell’s theorem is a mathematical proof, not a conjecture or supposition ... Bell does not merely permit or suggest that reality is non-local; he actually proves it. 20

A universe that displays local phenomena built upon a non-local reality is the only sort of world consistent with known facts and Bell’s proof.21

So much for Reality (and what it must be). If now we go to David

Bohm, we may begin by saying that the covers of our LPs are a bit inspired also by what Bohm has to say right below, in the first quote, dealing with the experience of a moment in time, with a “now”, that (just as our precise location, in the gallery, would begin to be a little ambiguous, fuzzy) turns up as “never completely localizable … determined only by the broader context in which they are embedded”.

    And since we started these notes with paying our respects to a great poet, we might well, still in the opus circulatorium, end that way also, taking a fragment of a speech, delivered October 22, 1960, by the great Paul Celan:

From here, thus starting from the “accommodating,” but also in the light of uto- pia, let me now undertake some topos research:

I am searching for the region from which Reinhold Lenz and Karl Emil Franzos, whom I met onthe way here and in Georg Büchner, come. As I am back where I started from, I am also searching for the place of my origin.

I am searching for all of this with a no doubt very imprecise because fidgety finger on the map—a child’s map, I have to confess.

None of these places can be found, they do not exist, but I know where, espe- cially now, they should be, and ... I find something!

Ladies and gentlemen, I find something that consoles me a little for having in your presence taken this impossible route, this route of the impossible.

I find what connects and leads, like the poem, to an encounter.

I find something—like language—immaterial, yet terrestrial, something circular that returns to itself across both poles while—cheerfully—even crossing the trop- ics: I find ... a meridian.26

— SKTU, September 2014

Essay

Texts

Scores

Recordings

Publications