Music from Before the Beginning, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Music from Before the Beginning

by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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1.	Hydrothermal Vent 02:50	info	buy track
2.	Waters of Innocence 06:04	info	buy track
3.	Tentacle Time 02:04	info	buy track
4.	Nay Yama Dodo Tulu 04:00	info	buy track
5.	To Be in the World 04:09	info	buy track
6.	I Am Leafy Speafing 04:04	info	buy track
7.	Archaea 04:58	info	buy track
8.	Double Helix 03:12	info	buy track
9.	Perch on Pine 03:24	info	buy track
10.	Anemones Waving Goodbye 04:26	info	buy track
11.	Clouds Unfold 03:57	info	buy track

about

Go back
Go back
To the beginnings
To the tide pools
To the lips of the sea
To the fringe of first life
Where the little ones wash up from time’s deep womb.

• This album reflects my lifelong fascination with so-called primitive life forms, which of course aren’t primitive at all. Protozoa and such. And it reflects my fascination with organic evolution as a continuous unfolding of communication, in layers and levels that interweave and intertwine in shapes we cannot describe but can experience. In Hydrothermal Vent, a single instrument, the 6-string violectra, plays layer over layer, under layer, a fluid world of change, and it unfolds from there. “Simple” solos for viola d’amore which is an old instrument of many layers – is that solo one voice or many? Simple birdsongs swooping around each other – can you tell them apart? One or many? Primitive life forms or old life forms far more advanced than we are? Nay Yama Dodo Tulu.
• Is it improvised, is it composed? Can you pick the two apart? When the improvisation is toyed with and manipulated on tape (which doesn’t exist anymore) or on hard disk (which doesn’t exist anymore) or on SSD memory (which currently exists but maybe won’t in the future) – is that improvisation or composition? What is it? It is evolution. Evolution – a prime exemplar of an improvisational, internetworked activity that seems in retrospect as though it were composed.
• This music is all new in 2023, but the title Music from Before the Beginning, and the graphic design, I used in a concert of improvised violin music in Berkeley California in 1978. I was making films and publishing about protozoa in the 1960s. In the 1970s as I was discovering William Blake and the magic of improvising music in real time, I wrote the lines above: “Go back, go back, to the beginnings …” I also wrote

Who can know the truth
Of Earth’s early youth?
Only Trickster was there
To witness with his eyes
And he always lies.

credits

released October 5, 2023

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about

Stephen Nachmanovitch Virginia

Stephen Nachmanovitch performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist, and at the intersections of music, dance, theater and multimedia arts. He is the author of two books on the creative process, THE ART OF IS and FREE PLAY. He has taught widely on creativity and the spiritual underpinnings of art, and has had numerous appearances on media, and at music and theater festivals. ... more

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