Tarkovsky’s Inner Ear

| Tyran Grillo

Released by Cold Spring on September 4, 2026, this vital boxed set gathers remastered soundtracks from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre across five CDs. Their passage from Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s orchestral writing to Eduard Artemyev’s electronic interiors opens a fissure that continues to emit productive fumes from deep within the core of the earth to this very day. The individually printed sleeves and accompanying artcards, reproducing Soviet and Japanese posters, return these intimate experiences to their public faces. Inside the matte box, however, cinema contracts to the dimensions of a listening body. The change of composers also shifts the terms of attention. Ovchinnikov gives the human voice an analog horizon, while Artemyev lets that horizon infiltrate the voice until its source shades into humanless oblivion. Across this passage, the sacred grows increasingly difficult to distinguish from the material conditions of hearing. An entire landscape can settle behind the sternum, its trees drawing nourishment from an ache whose origin we cannot locate.

Ovchinnikov’s score for Ivan’s Childhood (1962) enters a bucolic world already trembling at its foundations. Harp illuminates the strings from within, while the winds carry a sweetness too alert to relax into innocence. Ivan, a 12-year-old scout whose family has been killed by the Nazis, resists the adults who would remove him from the front. His competence has become the terrible credential of a childhood forcibly surrendered. Against this, his dreams preserve his mother’s presence, although preservation offers little protection. Ovchinnikov allows lyricism its full emotional amplitude, making Ivan’s vulnerability almost unbearable. Every tender phrase acquires a second circulation beneath its surface, carrying the blood of an event still waiting to occur.

Percussion unsettles this fragile enclosure, dislodging any confidence that the ground will remain beneath Ivan’s feet. Between the double basses and the violins’ breathier extremities stretches an abyss through which his small body must somehow pass. Even the adult courtship surrounding Masha cannot establish a refuge. Kholin’s kiss, suspending her above a ditch in the birch forest, binds desire to the geometry of danger; intimacy briefly occupies the space a grave might claim. The score’s dances register such pleasure with an urgency that exposes its provisional tenancy. Timpani give mortality a pulse, and the brass answers with cries that seem torn from the soul’s anatomy. Once Ivan’s fate becomes known, the final dream’s return to childhood cannot repair the historical wound. The hymnal slowing of the music leaves the water holding an image for which the world has withdrawn its permission.

With Andrei Roublev (1966), the sanctuary becomes a place of entropy. Bells bring their immense, inhabited hollowness into Ovchinnikov’s writing, and the flute’s more solitary inflections suggest a melody listening for its own burial. Tarkovsky’s icon painter moves through a medieval Russia where religious vocation offers no exemption from human brutality. After killing a man during the sack of Vladimir, Rublev renounces painting and takes a vow of silence. Heard against this refusal, the score’s choral abundance becomes agonizingly complex. A voice may ascend while its owner remains implicated in what happens below. A lone soprano, surrounded by the brittle intimacy of struck strings, opens a small aperture in that contradiction. Through it comes the possibility that devotion begins in the inability to reconcile the beauty one can imagine with the suffering one has helped to make.

Pagan ritual and Christian authority trouble one another across the film, denying its sacred spaces any simple moral enclosure. Ovchinnikov’s murmuring voices deepen this instability, their apparent serenity revealing chambers of holy delirium. Orchestral surges can dazzle so completely that vision becomes another impediment to seeing. Yet the bell-casting episode, in which the young Boriska risks everything on a skill he claims to have inherited, draws sound back toward the labor of fallible hands. His eventual confession that his father never entrusted him with the secret of casting recasts the bell’s successful ringing as an act undertaken without certainty. Rublev’s response, offering companionship and a return to creative work, gives the music’s spiritual reach a human address. Hearing the score apart from the film makes that dynamic newly palpable. The choir seems to gather clay around its vowels, each sustained breath touching the substance from which an image of the divine will have to be fashioned. Even transcendence has dirt beneath its fingernails.

This brings us to Solaris (1972), where Artemyev makes electronic sound inseparable from the disturbance of recognizing oneself. Bach’s chorale prelude, BWV 639, played on organ by Leonid Roizman, establishes an earthly center whose apparent stability the surrounding textures steadily estrange. Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at a space station orbiting a sentient ocean and encounters Hari, his wife who died by suicide, returned through an intelligence working upon his memories. Her presence gives bereavement a body, then exposes the insufficiency of the recollection from which that body has been made. Artemyev’s ANS synthesizer inhabits this interval with extraordinary sensitivity. Familiarity becomes almost extraterrestrial when it approaches us without the consoling distance of representation. A remembered face can turn toward its rememberer and begin asking questions he has spent years avoiding.

The metallic drones and rattling chains seem to exchange occupants. Abrasive resonances presage the vibrating sculptures of Harry Bertoia, although here the bronze appears to have grown directly through the nervous system. Beneath them, a rushing darkness carries the bodily cost of Kelvin’s encounter. Hari’s growing awareness of her condition exceeds the boundaries of his remorse, and the soundtrack permits that excess to remain frightening. Resurrection acquires an ethical burden: Having summoned someone through desire, what right have we to dictate the terms of her existence? Of these five discs, this one sustains the most persuasive independent life. I hear affinities with early Lull and Thomas Köner in its submerged expanses, if intensified by a harsher grain. Sound retains enough resistance to prevent contemplation from becoming comfortable, even at its most ravishing.

I remain particularly haunted by the final withdrawal of the camera, revealing the apparent return to Kelvin’s father’s house as an island within the Solaris ocean. The strings make the scale of that disclosure bodily. Home has become something another intelligence can construct, while the longing invested in it remains painfully ours. Hearing this passage without its image intensifies my memory of that first viewing, opening a trapdoor beneath the relief I we all want the scene to initially grant. Bach’s devotional gravity now gathers around a question of responsibility. If an alien consciousness can offer the shape of forgiveness, the person kneeling inside that shape must still answer for the life that brought him there. The ocean may contain the house; it cannot perform the work of inhabiting it.

Mirror (1975) carries this unstable habitation into the folds of an individual life. Of all these soundtracks, it seems most thoroughly absorbed into its film, sound and image exchanging their functions until each becomes the other’s means of recollection. The largely unseen Alexei moves through childhood memories and the clefts of his adult relationships. Margarita Terekhova’s presence as both his mother, Maria, and his former wife, Natalia, makes recognition falter inside its own apparent success. The face returns, but the person demands another encounter. Even as Artemyev’s electronic textures inhabit this complicated recurrence, pastoral beauty offers little chronological reassurance. A field can belong to childhood while opening directly onto the fear of losing one’s son, and the music enters through both distances at once.

Chant and synthesizer inhabit the same tenuous dwelling; Baroque passages introduce an elegance that memory cannot keep intact. The European inflections, with their flamenco bite, cut across any temptation to hear this world as a sealed Russian interior, finding resonance in the film’s Spanish exiles and Civil War footage. Proof that private remembrance has neighbors, even when it believes itself alone. Maria’s panic over a possible printing error, followed elsewhere by the impossible suspension of her body above a bed, sets institutional terror against an image of profound weightlessness. Artemyev allows these incompatible states to share an acoustic bloodstream. Arseny Tarkovsky’s recited poems further complicate the inheritance, the director’s father entering a son’s cinema through his own living voice. Listening becomes a form of kinship whose obligations extend beyond the people we can identify. Anonymous bodies in archival footage acquire a terrible proximity to the family photograph. This is where the soundtrack’s apparent diffuseness becomes essential. Its passages refuse the neat ownership of a single emotional subject, allowing a feeling to migrate beyond the person who first appeared to authorize it.

Stalker (1979) approaches us through a landscape whose every invitation may conceal a prohibition. A guide leads the Writer and the Professor into the restricted Zone toward a Room reputed to grant the deepest desires of whoever enters it. Artemyev’s Indian-inflected flute and circling electronics invest this movement with exquisite uncertainty. Melody flowers through the mechanical rattle of the rail journey, opening inward even as the travelers advance. Water drips into an acoustic space that seems to be aware of its own depth. The score’s choral beauty gathers around the guide’s battered faith, yet its tenderness leaves room for the skepticism of his companions. Their arguments cannot domesticate what surrounds them. Each attempt to turn the Zone into an explanation seems to lengthen the path through it.

The story of Porcupine, who sought his dead brother and received wealth, places a terrible doubt inside the promise of fulfillment. Desire may know us in ways our preferred account of ourselves cannot bear. This possibility deepens the music’s spiraling movement, its delicacy admitting a self-undoing more intimate than catastrophe. A flute phrase can seem to reach the threshold and hesitate there, having discovered that admission would require surrendering the identity that asked to enter. Artemyev makes the spiritual ordeal inseparable from physical duration. The track rattles beneath the body, while an electronic halo gathers around the effort to believe. Such passages return me to the care with which these soundtracks conduct emotional transference. We carry ourselves into their spaces and encounter the limits of what we are prepared to receive. Their beauty can leave our knowledge painfully incomplete.

Then there is Monkey, the Stalker’s daughter, sitting at a table as a drinking glass apparently moves beneath her gaze. The domestic surface holds an event the arduous expedition could neither secure nor explain. I find myself thinking less about the girl’s possible powers than about the glass. Throughout this set, objects have borne so much human longing that we might reasonably ask whether our hunger for revelation has allowed them an existence of their own. The bell must announce faith; a house must accommodate remorse. Here, an ordinary vessel slides toward the edge of what we can account for, carrying no assurance that its mystery concerns us. Perhaps reverence requires us to release even the desire to be spiritually enlarged by everything we encounter. Somewhere inside the glass, beyond the reach of thirst, there may be a life that has never asked to become our revelation.

Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica: Pages of a Biography (ECM New Series 2803)

| Tyran Grillo

Gidon Kremer
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography

Gidon Kremer violin
Geneva Lewis violin
Andrew Pushkarev vibraphone, tubular bell
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography, Passacaglia, Darf ich…
recorded January 2024
Studio Residence Paliesius, Ignalina
Engineers: Vilius Keras, Aleksandra Kerienė
Kaleidoscope of Lost Time
recorded September 2020
at the Reformation Church, Riga
Recording engineer: Varis Kurmiņš
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 30, 2026

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica continue their long association with ECM’s New Series on Pages of a Biography, a recording in which the violinist’s history passes through the hands of those who have helped to shape it. Georgs Pelēcis and Andrius Žlabys contribute works conceived for Kremer, while Arvo Pärt’s presence reaches back to Tabula Rasa, the 1984 release that inaugurated the imprint. With Kremer approaching his 80th birthday in 2027 and the ensemble its 30th anniversary, the program opens a space in which the commemorative impulse can become strangely permeable. A life told through music acquires entrances its subject could never have built alone. Founded in 1997 to bring young musicians from the Baltic states into a shared artistic undertaking, Kremerata Baltica gives this understanding a collective body.

Pärt’s Passacaglia, heard in the orchestral version prepared in 2007 for Kremer’s 60th birthday, establishes this relationship through the simplest of circular motions. Kremer and Geneva Lewis draw their violin harmonies over the strings with a delicacy whose slightly abraded edges give the music a spirited skin. Andrei Pushkarev’s vibraphone places metallic footprints across a frozen lake, each tone opening a small chamber of depth beneath the surface. There is something almost Vivaldian in the suppleness of the textures, though the lower strings carry a dramatic undertow that gathers its force slowly. Pizzicato figures bring that development inward, registering as minute disturbances in the body’s private machinery. Above them, the violin lines entwine and separate with an ease that leaves room for friction. The recurring harmonic pattern gives each change a place to return to, even as its emotional coordinates shift. Within the circle, belief is allowed to wander; repetition discovers the difference between coming back to a place and becoming available to it.

Pelēcis’s title concerto, written for Kremer in 2007, gives that wandering a more personal geography. Their friendship began during their school years in Riga and continued in the shared quarters of the Moscow Conservatory, where Pelēcis witnessed the preparation through which public achievements slowly acquired their private framework. His score draws on the violin concertos that became decisive points in Kremer’s early career. Brahms and Elgar enter alongside recollections of competition performances; Sibelius and Beethoven provide further points of contact with the interpreter’s developing identity. Yet the quotations remain answerable to the person who once lived inside them. Set among more dramatic episodes, they emerge from the uncertain border between musical inheritance and remembered experience. Pelēcis’s description of the solo monologues as “intimate pages from a personal diary” becomes especially telling here. The diary has been written by someone else, and its subject must read himself into being through a voice that already knows him.

The opening solo feels its way into this territory with the vulnerability of childhood. Kremer gives the line an existence prior to explanation, finding in its exposed grain the authority of something alive. Buoyant orchestral gestures begin to court it, and their exchanges admit dissonance at the margins. Pelēcis lets passages of flowing beauty encounter the abrupt editing cuts of recall, as the pastoral turns its pockets inside out, spilling dark coins into the grass. Throughout the piece’s nearly thirty uninterrupted minutes, the violin speaks from within that complexity, drawing the insistent rhythms of the strings into its own work of discovery. Kremerata Baltica responds with an alertness that gives the broader episodes their cinematic scope while preserving the intimacy of the solo voice. The relationship between them becomes a sustained act of thinking in sound, capable of admitting doubt without surrendering its momentum. Near the close, the vibraphone distils the preceding expansiveness into a peculiarly bare utterance. The violin threads itself through that resonance, a silver filament drawn from a sentence whose meaning has become too familiar for speech.

With Žlabys’s Kaleidoscope of Lost Time, composed between 2014 and 2020 for Kremer and his ensemble, that inward scrutiny enters a more fractured consciousness. The composer envisioned Kremer’s sound in his earliest sketches, and the violin writing carries the imprint of a particular touch even at its most abstract. Žlabys speaks of giving the sensation of time’s disappearance a more durable form through music, so that beauty and sadness can be visited again. Across the work’s five movements, such revisitation becomes a problem of perception: every return alters the eye through which the past is apprehended. The opening Prelude sets this process in motion through dramatic undulations, its folk inflections carrying something dreamt into the firmness of the pulse. The dance occasionally appears to have misplaced its dancers, leaving their gestures suspended in the strings. Kremer inhabits those absences with a searching intensity, giving the music’s surreal spaces enough physical resistance to be felt. Time acquires joints here, and we hear the strain of their bending.

Scherzacaglia carries its mixed ancestry in its name, inviting musical forms to loosen their claims to separate identities. Along the way, neoclassical poise meets a rhythmic insistence suggestive of Shostakovich. Dissonant hymnody opens fissures in the devotional surface. The performers give each shift a distinct pressure, sustaining the sense of movement through different states as Dissonance gives way to Quarter=87. In Perpetuum, the violin’s flowing beauty opens an expanse so luminous that earlier agitations seem briefly to have been cast by its light. The double basses stir beneath that radiance, pulling its apparent weightlessness toward the body, until the opening dance reenters with the altered gravity of something that has survived its own telling. Žlabys makes this return both irresistible and disturbing.

Pärt’s Darf ich … (1999) gathers these questions into a more intimate register, with Lewis taking the solo violin part beside Pushkarev’s tubular bell in C sharp. The violin has a declamatory force that feels inseparable from its prayerfulness: its address is bold because the act of addressing remains vulnerable. Against the strings, the bell gives that vulnerability a vertical dimension, opening a heavenward passage through the music’s spare physical means. A requiem appears to have been dismantled and its fragments reassembled as a psalm, the weight of mourning redistributed through the possibility of praise. Kremer calls the work “almost a prayer,” understanding it as a reminder that musicians serve a cause beyond themselves. Lewis gives that conviction a voice of her own, making the album’s generational relationship audible in the place where it becomes most exposed. Her final high note is exquisitely breathy, a slender fold in the air holding open the title’s unfinished question. Permission itself acquires a barely material form.

That question quietly rearranges the premises of a recording devoted to one musician’s life. On an album named for Kremer’s biography, the closing solo belongs to another person, and his history finds one of its deepest expressions in her freedom to speak. The friendship encoded in Pelēcis’s concerto and the evanescence Žlabys seeks to preserve have brought us to an ethic of hospitality. Whatever these relationships transmit may become unrecognizable to the giver. Biography begins to touch the obscure responsibilities of parenthood, where a future is nurtured without its face being prescribed. Somewhere an eyelid is forming in darkness, protecting a gaze the past cannot rehearse. To have lived well may be to have made room for that gaze, including everything in it that will never turn toward us.

Tania Giannouli/Nik Bärtsch Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My review of Metakosmos, the new duo album by Tania Giannouli and Nik Bärtsch, is now available at All About Jazz. Across eight pieces, the Greek and Swiss pianists bring melodic luminosity and rhythmic precision into an intimate exchange, exploring how attentive listening allows two distinct musical imaginations to create a shared world. Repetition becomes a means of discovering difference, while dampened strings, submerged strummings, and percussive accents reveal unexpected voices within the pianos. The review follows these encounters through dreamlike interiors, spiraling patterns, and moments of poised exuberance, considering how the music makes room for meanings neither player could arrive at alone

A Full Stop Short of Eternity: The Color of Absence in Jon Fosse’s Septology

| Tyran Grillo

For out of black minutes of madness ever more radiant,
The patient one wakes on the petrified threshold,
And is ardently clasped by cool blue and the gleaming decline of
the autumn,
The silent house and the legends of the forest,
Measure and law and the moonlit paths of the departed.
–Georg Trakl

A blank canvas seems to contain every possible image until the first stroke starts taking them away, so begins our story with a picture that cannot quite be settled, two painted lines, one brown and one purple, crossing upon a canvas, making a modest, wounded geometry whose light appears to originate somewhere beyond the pigment, while outside, on the western coast of Norway, the daylight contracts toward Christmas, and an aging painter named Asle stands looking at what he has made, though the more he looks the less securely the picture belongs to him, and this is the threshold of Jon Fosse’s Septology, a seven-part novel published in three volumes, The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name, translated by Damion Searls, in which Fosse, the Norwegian writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, gives us a single week in the life of a widowed, sober, solitary Catholic painter, yet a life entire within that week, beginning on a Monday in Advent and unfolding without a conventional full stop, a formal audacity that might demand admiration before granting pleasure but whose effect is almost disarmingly intimate, for I rarely felt imprisoned by the absence of periods, instead drawn into the velocity of someone thinking, a consciousness whose turns and retracings have not submitted to the editorial tyranny of retrospect, and one keeps reading because each thought opens another room, while the rooms have a troubling habit of opening onto the same darkness, each part beginning with the same astonishment, “And I see myself standing,” before ending in prayer, while between those gestures the conceit of chronology gives way to chambers of time without dependable walls, Asle living in his house in Dylgja, driving to Bjørgvin, visiting the gallery that sells his work, cooking for his neighbor Åsleik, considering an invitation to Christmas dinner, all the while his present being entered by lives that have already ended, for his wife, Ales, is dead and not dead, her absence factual, her presence no less persuasive, familiar objects opening suddenly into conversations with her, Asle speaking to her daily without pretending that speech will bring her back, their names exchanging almost the same letters, Asle and Ales suggesting a minute orthographical disturbance, a rearrangement through which a living man discovers he can never quite separate his name from that of the person he mourns, until even the novel’s tense seems to migrate with them, for yesterday has not receded into evidence but reaches forward and alters the pressure of every ordinary noun in the room, while in one recollection Ales becomes “the sky over everything in the world,” a wonderfully excessive image whose tenderness contains a threat, for if the beloved is everywhere, grief can scarcely find a place to put its feet, which returns us to the intersecting strokes of the opening picture, a cross being a place where two directions remain distinct yet touch, where the surface bears the mark of an event it cannot reverse, and Asle knows that a painting’s potential cannot be summoned through beauty alone, since Asle thinks that “a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it,” a proposition refusing the sentimental consolation that suffering automatically improves art, darkness being neither decoration nor an ethical entitlement to beauty but the resistance against which light becomes perceptible, though the picture remains answerable to whatever pain has entered it, the painter himself tormented by images lodged inside him, including his “innermost picture,” his work an attempt to release them into material form without reducing their mystery, paint fusing with canvas as he has fused with painting, and here his account of the image approaches a theology of embodiment, the painted surface inhabited by a spirit made of matter and soul together, so that the picture says something while refusing to say it, its speech impossible to paraphrase, just as there is no sentence in which grief can finally be deposited and left behind, which may be why memory returns Asle to a childhood of startling chromatic precision, to his sister Alida seeing a brown rowboat where he sees an abundance of different browns, objecting to the single word that erases them, her way of seeing providing the boundary against which his own perceptions emerge, his painterly vocation becoming an apprenticeship to colors the available vocabulary cannot hold, while the playground preserves a freedom of expression before the prohibitions of adult life harden into posture, and yet Alida, too, has disappeared into death, Asle’s mind storing the person and her absence in the same image, so the greater the fidelity of recollection the less certain it becomes whether remembering protects someone from oblivion or renews the fact that she cannot return, the novel’s repetitions performing the same experiment on its reader, each recurrence shifting the angle of incidence, until what seemed familiar acquires another hue, as though a remembered color had been mixed in darkness and returned to us altered, and then there is the other Asle, the Namesake, a doppelgänger of almost identical appearance who also paints and whose drinking has carried him into physical collapse, the men having first met through Sigve, an acquaintance from the narrator’s youth, their resemblance unbearable because it threatens to make identity an error of recognition, so that the narrator insists “if he and The Namesake look exactly the same then their souls, their spirits, can’t be as similar as their appearance,” a claim with a trembling logic, since outward sameness must conceal inward difference or the very idea of a singular life begins to fail, yet Fosse continually exposes that confidence to doubt, both men inhabiting ordered rooms whose neatness scarcely contains the disorder within, both carrying images that will not release them, both having known the devastation of alcohol, though one has stopped imbibing while the other cannot, his shaking body desperate for a drink that might briefly arrest its own rebellion, an apparatus of separation estranged from its agency, until the narrator finds the Namesake collapsed in the snow and takes him to the hospital, and this becomes the novel’s most urgent act of rescue, although what it rescues remains uncertain, the doubling tempting us toward a ready moral allegory, one man saved by love and faith, the other destroyed by addiction, yet Fosse’s art is better than that accounting, the other Asle neither a discarded draft of the narrator nor evidence of his triumph, especially when the narrator imagines dragging the other’s pain along with him only to correct himself, “share his pain, share his suffering,” the correction ethically enormous, for pain is neither luggage to be transferred nor property one may confiscate in the name of compassion, and to share it is to stand close without becoming the person whose body endures it, while the Namesake longs to disappear, that desire making the resemblance more frightening, since disappearance is also what the sober Asle’s dead have enacted, the question of who a person might have been had one decision, one drink, one intervention gone differently, a question Fosse makes physical without granting the false mercy of an answer, difference persisting even at the point of almost perfect likeness, and against this hall of doubles stands Åsleik, the neighboring fisherman whose habitual visits and obstinate speech supply the book with wonderfully undignified comedy, since Asle can think he has never much liked him only to conclude, almost in the same breath, that this is why he does, calling him a fool and then recognizing a wisdom beyond the sophistication of his own thoughts, that uncorrected movement allowing friendship its irritations and thought its refusal to reach a stable verdict, so when Åsleik wonders whether there is anything he has not already told Asle, the question becomes at once a joke about repetition and a miniature theory of the novel, what we say again need not be the same thing because the hearer has meanwhile changed, each man seeming to know what the other conceals while choosing not to expose it, and such tact is its own grace, an evening of eggs, bacon, and onions becoming unexpectedly delicious, and the kitchen does not suspend metaphysics, it discloses how existence can arrive with the intensity of revelation while announcing nothing grander than a good meal shared, even as the week’s paintings and conversations draw Asle deeper into the religious problem occupying him since adolescence, when he rejected the authority of Norway’s established church, later entering Catholicism through his life with Ales yet resisting doctrinal certainties, including the exclusion of the unbaptized from salvation, his faith less a collection of positions than a sustained pressure upon the limits of language, for with his phrase for God, “He doesn’t exist, He is,” Asle moves the divine from the category of beings available for inspection toward the condition under which being becomes possible, an echo of apophatic theology, with its conviction that God recedes from every predicate designed to contain Him, even if this risks rendering the divine invulnerable to argument, particularly when Asle supposes the very word God proves God’s reality, a proposition hardly satisfying logical scrutiny yet revealing a mind for which language has become both bridge and obstruction, the hunger for an answer and the wound opened by asking, while the tension between grace and truth grows especially acute around Christ, for Ales tells Asle that God’s power is found in powerlessness, in the crucified body unable to free itself from the nails, while Asle considers a God whose self-imposed limits belong to omnipotence, whose great silence is interrupted when the Word enters history, and this theology leads back to the canvas, incarnation becoming a form entering a world unable entirely to contain it, color interrupting blankness, stillness made visible through disturbance, truth insisting upon separateness, upon the finality of a breath that stops, upon the impossibility of another person’s suffering becoming our own, whereas grace arrives without overturning those conditions, asking what relation might remain when possession is no longer possible, though perhaps grace is merely the beautiful name given to our refusal to surrender the dead, a question Fosse leaves active as his painter speaks with Ales without cancelling her death, the novel’s Christian imagination most convincing where faith remains vulnerable to the contrary evidence of the body, and somewhere in the middle of this week, in Part V, a remembered trivial exchange in an art supply shop begins to radiate strange consequence, the Namesake complaining that the store never seems to have white paint, even wondering whether it refuses to stock any, white, the substance easiest to take for granted, becoming scarce, which opens a useful physical paradox, since white light contains the visible spectrum together while white pigment appears white by scattering light rather than by mixing every paint color into one, Fosse’s painter moving between incompatible forms of fullness, the untouched canvas seemingly complete in its whiteness until the first mark reveals a purity merely waiting for interruption, a blank canvas can be rolled away and stored, but a painted canvas carries the history of its wounds, the missing white, amid innumerable colors without names, suggesting the impossibility of gathering everything into a single unbroken presence, the imagined color of reconciliation that no shop can reliably sell, and as the book’s epigraph from Revelation promises, “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth,” thus altering the problem of doubling, since the two Asles share a name but perhaps any name given publicly is only an approximate address, a provisional utterance unable to exhaust the soul it designates, the other Asle’s struggle resisting the division of lives into successful and failed, just as Asle and Ales might be less two separate names than an alphabet still rearranging itself under the pressure of love, yet Revelation’s private name carries its own disquiet, since a name nobody else can know threatens to efface the social and historical person recognized through the names of loved ones, mystical union becoming a temptation to erase difference, from which Fosse repeatedly returns us to the stubbornly particular body, shaking, eating, waiting, aging, crossing a stretch of water to reach another person, while the approach of Christmas offers no simple resolution, obliging the narrator to confront the possible extinction of someone whose existence seemed to repeat his own, other figures receding into death, the painter meanwhile experiencing a change stranger than any vision as the need to paint begins leaving him, “I feel sure in my whole body that I have no desire to paint anymore,” he thinks, having spent a lifetime expelling images whose accumulation felt unbearable, now sensing they might gather into one stillness without requiring external form, though to read this as a neat ascension from art to God would reduce paintings to preliminary exercises for a more perfect silence, overlooking how the book itself depends upon the work of making, how art has permitted pain to become visible and shareable, and only then can Asle imagine relinquishing its necessity, an exhaustion we should not prematurely baptize as serenity, since it might be liberation or the symptom of a life preparing to close, until at last Asle accepts Åsleik’s invitation and travels by boat toward the Christmas gathering at his sister Guro’s home, crossing the water to return to what he has most fiercely withheld from himself, Ales’s final breath, the doctor’s announcement that she has gone to rest with God, a recollection that cannot give her back but allows the irreversibility of loss to enter the same consciousness that has insisted upon her continued presence, and at the house he offers a painting, enters a room to rest, encounters Guro’s invitation to intimacy, declining because he remains inwardly married to Ales, a scene resisting easy piety, since whether such fidelity is a magnificent continuity of love or the last enclosure grief has built around him remains uncertain, as does whether the beloved can remain present without making the survivor unavailable to everyone living, Fosse neither mocking the attachment nor guaranteeing its innocence, and the Christmas meal waits elsewhere while Asle withdraws into the most crowded solitude imaginable, attended by memory, desire, remorse, prayer, the final prayer repeating the novel’s movement toward a threshold it refuses to cross in the expected grammatical way, Asle reciting the Hail Mary and seeing a blue radiance burst into his forehead, perhaps dying, perhaps granted a mystical perception resembling death only from outside, the distinction suspended exactly where the reader wants confirmation in a full stop, the missing words making the ending more articulate than any completed explanation, Asle reaching the appointed hour while language cannot pronounce what it has approached for hundreds of pages, the all-engulfing white unavailable in the art shop returning as a possible image of wholeness but arriving in blue, the shade of a final, untranslatable experience, Trakl’s “cool blue” and his threshold of the departed trembling open here, seven days having passed while every now contains an eternity no calendar can measure, so the supposed extravagance of a novel made from one sentence eventually feels exact, even if this review does not, since Fosse does not abolish endings so much as make us inhabit their postponement, the form asking what truth can accomplish when its customary instruments of completion are withdrawn, what grace might mean if it cannot restore the dead or guarantee the salvation of those still suffering, Ales remaining dead, the Namesake’s anguish not undone by resemblance, the canvas still marked, even the promised new name arriving as a secret beyond verification by ordinary speech, yet something persisting in the space opened by these failures of possession, an attentiveness refusing to make a person identical with his worst moment or most visible form, Advent naming the coming of a presence into history while Septology imagines the reciprocal event, history becoming susceptible to what it cannot name, its last words stopping before death can be spoken, life in that interruption seeming neither concluded nor redeemed so much as held, for an impossible instant, in the white interval between a breath and the withheld mortis nostrae, in the silence allowing the prayer to remain forever nunc et in hora

Kali Malone: Living Torch

| Tyran Grillo

To sustain a flame is to enter into a secret negotiation with extinction, to nourish an illumination whose very existence depends upon its gradual disappearance. In Living Torch, Kali Malone transforms this paradox into an almost unbearable metaphysics of resonance, wherein sound becomes both the vessel and the slow dissolution of its own materiality. Duration wavers between breath and electricity, harmonic inevitability and spectral disobedience. Each sustained tone carries the sediment of another, opening subterranean chambers where the ear must renegotiate its relationship to time. The austere architectures that have distinguished Malone’s compositional language, particularly her excavations of the pipe organ’s interior life, undergo a profound transfiguration. Something once seemingly immovable begins to tremble at the edges of its formal certainty, exposing a vulnerability concealed beneath the mathematics of repetition. Perhaps a structure reveals its deepest truth precisely when it can no longer guarantee its foundations.

Composed between 2020 and 2021 at the Parisian studios of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, that storied laboratory of electroacoustic experimentation, Living Torch extends Malone’s investigation of just intonation and canonic structures into a labyrinth of timbral interdependencies. The trombone of Mats Äleklint and bass clarinet of Isak Hedtjärn merge with Malone’s electronic apparatus, including the boîte à bourdons and an ARP 2500 synthesizer bearing the historical imprint of Éliane Radigue. Commissioned for GRM’s Acousmonium loudspeaker orchestra and premiered in its complete multichannel incarnation at Radio France, the piece treats space as an active participant in the reallocation of acoustic identity. The devotional patience of early music encounters the temporal dislocations of American minimalism, their intertwined genealogies refracted through the material consciousness of musique concrète. Within the sounding body, counterpoint undergoes a molecular reimagining. What survives of the canon is the eerie persistence of one vibration inside another, an inheritance speaking long after its source becomes unrecognizable.

In the first of the work’s two parts, the drone establishes itself as a compass of the heart, spinning in slow motion without ever securing a magnetic north. Its apparent stability is beset by minute discrepancies of pitch, the delicate interference of neighboring frequencies producing pulses that seem to originate beneath the audible surface. Just intonation, far from presenting a frictionless ideal of consonance, exposes the intimate volatility of consonance itself. One tone approaches another and the air thickens with consequences, while an apparently singular presence separates into competing interiors. Äleklint’s trombone contributes a corporeal grain that the electronics can prolong but never entirely domesticate. Hedtjärn’s bass clarinet emerges with a darker, more secretive pressure, its breath inhabiting the lowest registers with a kind of reluctant articulation. Their sonorities fuse with the circuitry, until the roughness of an attack or the instability of an exhalation discloses the laboring organism within. The human respiratory impulse is absorbed into an electrical continuum that nevertheless remains haunted by the possibility of suffocation.

The feeling of this music is intensely circular, caught in a bewildering simultaneity of waking and falling asleep. The internal drone wanders in search of a new body, only to discover the contours of the one it was desperate to leave, returning to the sadnesses that prompted its excursion. Malone’s long tones refuse the consolations of a conventional crescendo. Their concentration arises through microscopic redistributions of anxiety, through harmonic overtones that slip into audibility and retreat. Because the ear cannot settle upon a definitive foreground, listening assumes the uneasy condition of remembering something that has yet to become real. It is the opposite of déjà vu and is where the piece’s canonic intelligence becomes emotionally devastating. The music becomes an apparatus of selfhood, reforming its contours to prevent the body from disappearing while exhausting the impulse that keeps it alive.

By the second part, this inward circuitry has acquired a more troubled permeability. A sensation of distance enters the sound, suggesting wings gathering an impossible momentum. The instrumental voices seem to strain toward the edges of their registers, rubbing against the drones until the distinction between a breath drawn and a current sustained becomes increasingly tenuous. Low frequencies retain their gravitational authority, but their mass is traversed by finer disturbances, spectral fissures through which an unfamiliar dimension of the composition appears to glance. There is an undercurrent of despair in these migrations, although the music never permits despair the luxury of a settled identity. Each departure produces another return, subtly altering the place to which it leads. The two parts consequently establish a peculiar dramaturgy of circular motion, in which repetition does not close a circuit so much as deepen the wound around which the circuit has been drawn.

At moments, the atmosphere and trembling recall Darrin Verhagen’s Witch trilogy, whose sonic immersions can feel indistinguishable from visitations to the psyche’s hidden territories. Malone, however, moves according to the flickering logic of her own distinct flame. Where terror might be summoned by the arrival of an alien presence, Living Torch locates its deepest unease in the possibility that the foreign has always resided within the familiar. Its resonances move across the threshold where language ceases its habitual tug and asks the body to relearn the grammar of flight. Breath becomes an increasingly abstract measure of being, until the stillness of death seems momentarily audible inside the effort required to remain alive. The music’s spiritual force resides in this refusal to separate transcendence from its physiological cost.

What remains most unsettling is the ethical question concealed inside this choreography of persistence. A flame survives by consuming its own substance; a tone endures only through the continual expenditure of energy. Perhaps the self, too, is sustained through an unacknowledged succession of disappearances, each present tense quietly burning the person who made it possible. Between frequencies, identity ceases to be a possession and becomes a debt toward all the selves we have already extinguished. The torch illuminates no destination. It passes, instead, from one vanishing custodian to another, and the most difficult act of listening may be to recognize, among its vibrations, the unburied voices of those we had to become in order to survive ourselves.

A Name That Remembers: PIANIKA’s Intimate Circuits

| Tyran Grillo

There’s a secret, a beautiful secret, hidden behind the lips of most of us who write about music: our ears are magnets for fingerprints. We rarely notice them until a sound has already gone, leaving something of itself behind. In the music of PIANIKA, a New Zealand electronic producer, such elusive contact becomes a compositional principle. Acoustic sounds retain traces of their origins within electronic arrangements, where the organic and synthetic enter into an unusually sympathetic relationship. Her rhythms invite movement without demanding it, balancing the restorative qualities of ambient music with the physical pleasures of a gentle house beat. There is something quietly radical about this hospitality of sound, this willingness to let a melody disclose its vulnerabilities without requiring their resolution. Even the spaces between notes seem charged with possibilities for reflection, allowing the smallest gestures to acquire unexpected significance. PIANIKA makes music for those moments when consciousness loosens its grip on the immediate world.

The question of naming is particularly meaningful for PIANIKA, whose moniker is her middle name, inherited from her great-grandmother, the daughter of the chief of Maniapoto, a Māori iwi she describes as known for its music. Its history involves an intriguing act of translation: Bianca, a character in an English book, was given the Māori name Pianika. The association with purity or whiteness is therefore indirect, an etymological suggestion rather than a literal definition. As a child, she went by Pianika, although her official first name gradually assumed precedence. The inheritance continued to resonate more deeply with her, eventually becoming her artistic identity. Her music seems animated by this transformation, taking sounds from their original contexts and allowing them to communicate in unfamiliar ways.

Another inheritance proved equally consequential. “My grandmother passed away before I was born, leaving behind her piano,” PIANIKA recalls. The instrument remained in her childhood home, where she developed an immediate fascination with it, sometimes playing for hours. Music offered an early means of meditation and emotional expression, although her academic interests eventually led her toward biochemistry. That scientific background offers an interesting perspective on compositions whose seemingly simple structures reveal considerable intricacy upon closer listening. Her path changed at 22, when her partner asked why she had never considered pursuing music more seriously. Shortly afterward, she downloaded Ableton and began exploring electronic production, drawing upon more than a decade of informal classical piano experience. Her equipment remains modest: a laptop, headphones, a carefully maintained collection of virtual instruments and her beloved piano. This economy is reflected in the music, whose emotional range arises from a restrained sonic vocabulary.

Her practice draws further nourishment from the natural world, whose sounds she has gathered during years of travelling with a microphone. Field recordings become integral to her arrangements, preserving traces of the environments in which they originated. Daily walks through forests and beside the ocean remain essential to her creative routine, while sailing and surfing offer other forms of immersion. “I feel inspired most of all,” she confirms, “by the interactions of water and light.” Her album artwork features photographs taken during the same adventures that inspired the compositions. Although she received an offer of a photography scholarship in her final year of school, she pursued other interests, allowing her visual practice to develop alongside her music. Her photographs preserve encounters with a landscape; her compositions translate their sensory qualities into another medium.

PIANIKA has described her fusion of ambient music and subdued techno beats as “lullaby house,” an expression that captures her ability to reconcile the circularity of rhythm with the surrender of sleep. Her introduction to electronic production was strongly influenced by Majestic Casual and The Sound You Need, platforms that expanded her sense of what electronica could accomplish and “felt like coming home after a long journey.” Among her inspirations are KAASI, Petit Biscuit, ODESZA and Darius, although the sensuous vocal atmosphere of Galimatias and Alina Baraz’s Urban Flora seems especially relevant to her aesthetic. Despite these affinities, her compositions possess a distinct character, their rhythmic precision softened by affection for acoustic sounds and understated melodic development.

Across Pisces (2024) and Dream Work (2024), followed by the newly released Touch (2026), PIANIKA develops a vocabulary whose meanings remain beautifully unsettled. The first draws upon an astrological imagination, the second explores the unconscious processes through which memory and desire evolve, and the third turns toward physical contact and vulnerability. Together, they suggest a progression from cosmic belonging toward increasingly personal forms of connection. This is particularly compelling in electronic music, an art capable of generating extraordinary sensations of proximity through technological mediation. PIANIKA encourages us to consider how much of what we call presence depends upon memory and imagination.

With Pisces, musical structure and emotional expression seem inseparable. The title track opens in a gentle drift before the beat enters, discovering peace in a broken world. Just as its direction becomes predictable, the arrangement expands into weightlessness. In “One,” the human voice becomes increasingly important. Words remain shy and just beyond reach, yet their intentions are intensely present within the delicate backbeat; the listener responds to their tone without being directed toward a particular interpretation.

In a chill mix of “With You,” the lights of love dim as a blissful equilibrium develops through the interaction of rhythm and melody, suggesting two people discovering a way to communicate without eliminating their differences. The internal pulse of “Sun Kiss” feels connected to the body’s instinct for movement, its melodic details offering emotional release without insistence.

Of the three EPs, Dream Work offers the deepest immersion in PIANIKA’s contemplative affinities. Its opening “From Love (ambient edit)” has an immediately restorative quality, developing through subtle changes in texture rather than pronounced rhythmic movement. An ambient rendition of “Pisces” follows, its oceanic sounds suggesting the faint rush of blood in the ears.

“Interlude” brings the piano forward amid softly echoing textures, with birdsong joining the intimate relationship between natural sound and electronic composition. By the time “Hvar” introduces snapping fingers and flowing vocals, the music has acquired an even greater sense of proximity. A restrained digital pulse supports the arrangement, while the animate character of the singing makes this one of PIANIKA’s most affecting creations. She understands that tenderness depends as much upon what remains understated as upon what is openly expressed.

The piano assumes greater prominence in “Unravelled,” accompanied by a voice that moves gracefully around its melodic phrases. A sense of self-discovery emerges without insisting upon any final understanding. “Accolades” introduces delicate click-core sensibilities and lilting arpeggiations, suggesting nostalgia without attaching it to a particular memory. This sequence arrives at “You,” a loving conclusion that offers reassurance while acknowledging the uncertainties of attachment. Addressing another person involves recognizing an existence that can never become entirely available to us. Here, affection becomes a willingness to accept that mystery, allowing closeness to remain meaningful without eliminating distance.

The music is especially attentive to the subjective experience of time, which expands or contracts according to the intensity of inward attention. Hearing familiar material in a different arrangement encourages reflection upon memory and reinterpretation: musical ideas once associated with movement acquire another emotional character when their rhythmic context changes. Dream Work thus considers how experience continues to develop beyond the moment in which it first occurs.

Touch brings these concerns into a more explicitly affectionate register. Its opening “LUH” recalls the tender vocal atmospheres of Late Night Alumni, its delicate beat accompanying the passage of time with reassurance. “As You Grow” follows with midrange vocals that retain a slight distance while remaining clear in their emotional transmission. Beneath the singing, a gently insistent rhythm supports the patient, almost familial affection implied by the title.

An uplifting expression of development appears in “So Proud of You,” PIANIKA’s collaboration with TÂCHES. Higher clusters of sequenced notes lend the arrangement an expansive sense of movement and discovery. The transition toward “Shy” brings a quieter perspective on emotional exposure. Its vocal fragments convey affection through their hesitancy, approaching the threshold of intelligibility without always crossing it. Shyness acquires a dignity rarely afforded to it, becoming an indication of attentiveness rather than a limitation upon connection.

This openness to transformation is particularly evident in her treatment of the human voice. Asked how she decides when to sing and how to process her vocals, PIANIKA spoke of creative flow: “As an artist, I find satisfaction in turning down the volume of the conscious brain, and letting the subconscious make the art.” She frequently slices recordings into fragments, playing them through a drum rack and processing them with Valhalla Supermassive reverb. Such experiments sometimes suggest a song’s direction, as with “Shy.” While developing a remix of TÂCHES’s “Dances for Wolves,” she explored an alternative vocal interpretation that did not appear in the final remix but later supplied material for 9’6”. There is a philosophical implication in this fragmentation. Singing, ordinarily associated with identity and direct communication, becomes more ambiguous when words are separated from their original contexts. Meaning persists through tone and rhythm, beyond intelligible language.

The closing original version of “From Love” gathers these qualities into lo-fi beats and intimate singing that convey acceptance. Heard alongside its ambient treatment on Dream Work, it demonstrates how the same musical material can acquire new significance through changes in arrangement, much as our recollections evolve with subsequent experience. This relationship between continuity and transformation also illuminates the EP’s title. Physical contact is among our most immediate experiences, yet its meaning remains dependent upon interpretation. A touch can communicate reassurance or uncertainty according to circumstances the gesture itself cannot explain. PIANIKA approaches this nuance with sensitivity, recognizing that intimacy involves an ongoing negotiation between the desire for closeness and another person’s irreducible independence.

When I asked whether her music possessed a metaphysical or spiritual dimension, PIANIKA responded: “I think any music that makes you feel something is working with the metaphysical.” Music enters the body through measurable vibrations, yet the feelings awakened by those vibrations cannot be explained entirely through their physical properties. Each listener brings a different history to the encounter. PIANIKA hopes her work will communicate uplift, calm and awe for the beauty of the Earth, while allowing listeners to discover meanings beyond those she consciously intended. Its emotional clarity coexists with an openness that respects the complexity of those receiving it, offering consolation without presuming to know what anyone needs.

In the AI of the Beholder: Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine

| Tyran Grillo

“There are now more cameras on planet Earth than human beings.” A curious arithmetic, given how thoroughly the eye has been enthroned as the guarantor of experience. For centuries, to see meant that someone was there, even if that someone could only be imagined through the image left behind. Now vision takes place without the consolations of a witness. A photograph can pass directly into coordinate data, then find its way back to the world as an instruction. The picture may never appear before a pair of human eyes, yet it can determine whose face opens a door or whose body invites suspicion. Somewhere between capture and consequence, seeing has detached itself from sight. Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI enters this dislocation with the curiosity of an artist and the suspicion of someone who has learned that even suspicion can be engineered. His central provocation concerns the fate of images after they cease to require spectators. Behind it lurks an even stranger question: When we speak of the inner workings of an algorithm, what qualifies as an inner? There is no private chamber in which the machine contemplates its findings, no secret eyelid folding over a remembered world. Yet something happens beyond our immediate access, and that interval has become one of the most consequential territories of contemporary life. We have built a new interior without inhabitants, then mistaken its opacity for neutrality.

Paglen arrives here by way of a computer vision framework called Chair, developed with collaborators in the early 2010s. A camera aimed through a studio window rendered streets and buildings into a mobile architecture of green lines. Cars acquired bounding boxes while faces dissolved into calculable expressions. The familiar scene was being quietly disassembled into a universe of features no pedestrian could inhabit. It recalls Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt, the meaningful surround constituted through the capacities and needs of an organism. A tick does not encounter the forest we admire. It finds a world articulated by warmth and the chemical trace of its next meal. Such worlds are neither incomplete copies of an objective landscape nor private hallucinations floating free of matter. They are modes of relation. Paglen extends this thought to machines, arguing that the sensors we construct establish the terms on which their environments become legible. Yet there is a philosophical splinter lodged inside the analogy. An organism lives the consequences of its perceptual limits. Can a classifier be said to have a world when it has no bodily vulnerability or stake in its own continuance? Perhaps its Umwelt belongs less to the machine than to the institution that designs it. The algorithm’s apparent interior would then be a delegated intention, a borrowed organ of attention through which distant authorities touch the surface of things.

James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances complicates the picture further. An environment offers possibilities for action relative to a perceiver’s capacities. A ledge affords sitting to one body and an impassable barrier to another. Perception, understood in these ecological terms, already harbors an incipient verb. Paglen’s machines radicalize that insight by severing affordance from the reciprocity of embodied life. For a facial recognition network, a face affords identification. For a license plate reader, the fleeting passage of a vehicle affords registration and a future knock on the door. Their worlds are assembled around authorized operations, with every feature waiting to become a task. What makes this arrangement so uncanny is that we occupy these constructed environments without necessarily perceiving their invitations. An innocuous patch of pavement may afford a camera an encounter that the person walking across it cannot refuse. The machine’s field of possible actions overlays ours, a second geography draped across the first, transparent only to those permitted to read its maps. To ask how a machine sees is therefore to ask whose purposes have been installed inside seeing, and who bears the cost when the world answers back.

The book’s decisive conceptual movement follows from this asymmetry. Paglen urges us to exchange representation for activation, abandoning the comfortable assumption that an image primarily stands for something. A digital photograph is fundamentally machine-readable. Before it becomes a luminous arrangement on a screen, it can exist as a file available to automated inspection and manipulation. The screen is an optional detour. In the vast circuitry of social platforms and industrial surveillance, images have become operational events, setting other processes in motion without ever needing to be understood as pictures. Here the old grammar of the gaze turns inside out. We no longer simply look at images. Images look at us, or, more exactly, systems enlist images to extract information about the people passing through them. The photograph in an album once preserved a moment against disappearance. Its contemporary descendant may follow that moment into the future, adding another entry to a dossier that changes what opportunities its subject receives. The image becomes a small administrative afterlife, an unfinished sentence whose final verb is conjugated elsewhere. And because its action can remain invisible, the usual politics of visibility offers scant protection. How does one contest a picture one has never seen, taken by an eye that has never needed to acknowledge one’s presence?

To understand the metaphysics of this arrangement, Paglen stages a mischievous encounter with René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pomme. Magritte’s photorealistic apple refuses the equivalence of object and image, allowing meaning to proliferate in the gap between a painted thing and a linguistic declaration. A computer classifier, fed the painting, announces an apple with an assurance untroubled by surrealism. Paglen calls the resulting disposition machine realism. The machine’s declaration seems hilariously impoverished beside Magritte’s provocation, but that apparent foolishness conceals a formidable power. A classifier does not need to solve the riddle of representation to serve an automated sorting system. It needs only to place an input within a category that triggers the appropriate response. The philosophical complication comes afterward, when we realize that its certainty has material consequences. An apple rejected by an inspection camera may be diverted from the supermarket. A human face assigned to a category may be scrutinized or priced differently. Magritte’s cultivated ambiguity has entered a factory whose conveyor belts cannot wait for an answer. The joke turns on us. Our insistence that the machine has missed the point may itself miss the point of the machine.

Every classifier inherits a cosmology from its training set. Paglen’s account of ImageNet, assembled from millions of internet photographs and the nested categories of WordNet, makes the architecture of this inheritance unusually tangible. A taxonomy presents itself as an innocent solution to the problem of naming, yet its structure quietly decides which differences deserve recognition and which forms of life may be folded into the same drawer. Within ImageNet’s historical classification scheme, people were dispersed across racial designations and derogatory moral caricatures, while intimate identities appeared under demeaning labels. Such categories reveal an apparatus trained on culture’s sedimented injuries and granted the authority of measurement. The Japanese Female Facial Expression dataset offers a smaller, equally telling example. A handful of posed faces are used to construct a theory of recognizable emotion. Each photograph is assigned to a supposedly stable feeling, as though a woman’s expression could be detached from circumstance and reproduced as a universal psychological unit. Paglen’s point is not exhausted by the familiar warning that biased data yield biased results. The prior violence lies in the wager that reality comes furnished with fixed compartments awaiting discovery. Classification manufactures the stability it claims merely to record. To call a category universal is often to forget who had the power to write its definition.

This is why the book’s critique of machine vision moves so persuasively beyond the laboratory. Paglen follows automated license plate recognition into the municipal economy, where police departments and private contractors turn passing vehicles into continuously harvestable data. In his account of Vigilant Solutions, an ostensibly objective technical service becomes entangled with the collection of court debts and the extraction of money from vulnerable communities. The camera registers a plate. A database matches it to an outstanding fee. A local government discovers a revenue stream inside what had previously been an unmonetized instant of transit. Behind the frictionless interface is a deeply selective politics. People are individualized through exquisitely granular profiles, then treated as interchangeable instances of a bureaucratic type. Their specificity makes generalized discipline more efficient. The same logic enters delivery vehicles and retail stores, among other environments where movement becomes a metric and attention an asset. One begins to suspect that the alleged objectivity of automated sight has always been a costume for profit-driven appetites. What the camera sees with such miraculous accuracy is often whatever can be turned into a transaction. Far from merely describing the world, machine realism carves it into surfaces more easily seized.

Yet the book resists settling into a critique of databases. The deeper and more disquieting movement takes us into the alleged interior of images themselves. Early experiments in visual neuroscience suggested that cortical neurons respond to elementary orientations and patterns, from which increasingly complex perceptions might be assembled. Paglen recounts the notorious experiments of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, then Colin Blakemore’s work with kittens raised amid restricted visual stimuli. A kitten deprived of vertical lines could later struggle to perceive them. Sight emerged as an acquired choreography of neural responsiveness rather than a window installed at birth. These studies helped inspire a technological imagination in which computers might learn to recognize objects by detecting elementary features and building toward more intricate configurations. From AlexNet’s breakthrough in image recognition to the adversarial networks that began generating their own uncanny visual formations, the machine’s education was written in the borrowed vocabulary of nerves. The comparison remains illuminating only if we remember its limits. Contemporary neural networks are neither digital kittens nor transparent reproductions of biological sight, and the theory of perception itself has evolved far beyond those early experiments. The force of Paglen’s argument resides elsewhere, in the possibility that our images increasingly address the nervous system through its vulnerabilities rather than our judgment through its reasons.

The route from visual recognition to neural intervention gives Paglen some of his most startling pages. If images help activate patterns of response before conscious interpretation has finished its work, then the older dream of persuading someone through coherent messages begins to look quaint. The contemporary feed learns from hesitation and the fingers’ barely registered movements, refining its offerings around a portrait of desire that its subject never agreed to sit for. Paglen’s comparison with Nacho Cheese Doritos is both comic and exacting. Industrial snack food is engineered to recruit the senses beyond the modest business of nourishment. Networked images can be engineered toward an analogous excess, their textures and emotional cues calibrated for engagement rather than contemplation. He names the more aggressive possibility a cognitive injection attack, in which media exploit perceptual tendencies to elicit responses that evade deliberate reflection. The term risks lending too much coherence to a dispersed landscape of research and commercial experimentation. Still, it gives a troubling name to a familiar experience. We reach for the device before knowing what we hoped to find. We are the kittens, Paglen suggests, raised in perceptual enclosures whose narrow openings come to define the imaginable. Where, then, does the manipulated image end and the habituated mind begin? If the circuits that seize attention also educate the organ of attention, media have entered the very composition of the self.

Paglen’s excursion into magic reveals that this invasion of perception has a surprisingly elaborate prehistory. The stage magician John Mulholland, later recruited into the CIA’s MKUltra orbit, understood that deception succeeds by exploiting what an audience has already learned to overlook. An empty hand is effective because attention has been directed toward the other one. The secret of the trick resides in the spectator’s confidence that the visible sequence contains everything worth seeing. Mulholland translated these insights into covert techniques, while other researchers explored attempts to influence behavior through direct stimulation of the nervous system. Nearby in Paglen’s account stands ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum’s early chatbot, whose simple prompts led users to attribute feeling and intention to an arrangement of conversational rules. The magician and the programmer meet at a peculiar threshold. Both produce an apparent someone from a carefully arranged absence. Their effects depend upon an audience willing to complete the apparition from within. We tend to imagine the black box concealing a more sophisticated intellect than the visible output can disclose. Sometimes the supposed intelligence is our own, recruited without acknowledgment to animate the device. An algorithm can acquire the semblance of inwardness through the human habit of granting agency to whatever answers. The machine’s most intimate chamber may turn out to be the imagination we bring to its door.

That possibility becomes a political nightmare in the book’s extraordinary detour through UFOs and intelligence operations. Paglen revisits Richard Doty’s alleged disinformation campaigns around Paul Bennewitz, whose suspicions of extraterrestrial activity could be intensified by fabricated evidence and carefully staged corroboration. He also recounts Cold War experiments in electronic deception, including the Palladium program, designed to make adversarial sensors register apparitions that were never present in the form their instruments reported. The proposition is chilling in its simplicity. Make a system see what you want it to see, then allow its own authority to ratify the fiction. The dream of making anything appear as anything had entered the electromagnetic spectrum. UFOs become the ideal emissaries of this logic, hovering where a failure of evidence can always be converted into evidence of concealment. Paglen is most compelling when he treats these episodes as histories of managed perception rather than proof of some master conspiracy. His assemblage nevertheless requires a discriminating reader. Technical deception documented in government records is not evidentially equivalent to retrospective testimony or speculative interpretation. The book occasionally enjoys their proximity so much that the differences begin to shimmer. Yet this instability also exposes the dilemma it investigates. The better a manufactured revelation accommodates the desires of its audience, the more easily doubt becomes part of its sustaining mythology. Disbelief itself can be trained to serve belief.

Photography once seemed to offer an escape from this labyrinth through the authority of light. A photograph traditionally testified to a physical encounter between the world and a sensitive surface, claiming a material warrant that painting could never guarantee. While its indexical gesture could never claim innocence, the idea of a trace allowed an uneasy agreement between perception and external reality. Paglen brings this technological faith into contact with the suspicion of graven images in the Hebrew Bible. The prohibition recognizes how readily an image can usurp the authority of what it depicts, while prophetic tradition invests the divine Voice with the capacity to establish what must be believed. The camera, in modernity, appears to reverse that hierarchy. Seeing acquires a privilege formerly assigned to revelation. Yet the reversal may be less complete than it seems. Photographs have always required a surrounding apparatus of testimony and trust, an interpretive community willing to grant the trace significance. An image from Abu Ghraib can furnish evidence of atrocity, while its grotesque resemblance to religious iconography generates meanings no sensor could certify. The luminous record both exceeds and depends upon the circumstances of its making. Paglen’s account of generative AI unsettles this fragile covenant by permitting images to reproduce the aesthetic signs of photographic evidence without having passed through an equivalent encounter. Light survives as a style after losing its privileged role as witness. Its old authority remains available for counterfeit use.

The final chapter finds a remarkable laboratory for this crisis in the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, where accounts of extraordinary encounters coexist with painstaking attempts to verify them. Paglen moves between the elaborate inventions of UFO claimant Billy Meier and the empirical archive of scientist Richard Haines, whose investigations seek a stable account of anomalous aerial phenomena. The photograph occupies the uncertain ground between them. It offers an apparent piece of the world while inviting belief to complete whatever the frame withholds. Paglen calls this condition superpositional, borrowing a term from quantum physics to describe images that remain suspended between competing possibilities until some act of interpretation fixes their significance. A photograph can sustain incompatible stories because no image delivers its own rules of interpretation. Generative media radicalize that condition, multiplying plausible appearances while weakening the tacit promise that a camera stood before the depicted event. The UFO photograph becomes a strange ancestor of the AI portrait, each carrying a claim on the real that exceeds what its visible marks can secure. An archive intended to preserve marginal histories begins to resemble a rehearsal space for ordinary experience. We have all become custodians of images that might testify or simply ask to be believed.

The book’s great achievement is to refuse the comforting notion that such uncertainty concerns images alone. Paglen’s examples repeatedly return us to the feedback circuit between perception and the institutions shaping its habits. An AI-generated photograph of a suffering child can circulate as evidence of a disaster that never took place, yet provoke actual donations or outrage. The image becomes consequential through the reality of the responses it solicits. Political actors need no longer persuade an audience that every detail is verifiable if an image confirms an emotional world already held to be true. Here the distinction between authenticity and efficacy suffers a devastating separation. Something may be demonstrably false in origin and nevertheless function as an engine of social fact. This is the darkest extension of Paglen’s movement from representation to activation. The image need not win an argument with reality when it can help rearrange the conditions under which reality is encountered. But the book also leaves room for a necessary objection. If every image is understood chiefly through the actions it triggers, we risk granting manipulation the status of a complete theory of seeing. The same perceptual openness that makes us vulnerable enables surprise and the recognition of another person’s suffering. Art can interrupt an inherited category rather than reinforce it. Ambiguity need not be a weakness awaiting exploitation but can be the beginning of ethical attention.

Perhaps this is what it would finally mean to learn to see as a machine sees. Such learning asks us to identify the procedures through which a living world is rendered operational, then recover what those procedures are designed to discard. We must recognize the machine’s immense power without attributing to it a consciousness whose absence conveniently absolves its makers. We must also resist the fantasy of returning to a pristine human eye, for perception has never stood outside mediation. As Bruce Wexler’s neurological account suggests in Paglen’s retelling, media help flesh out the beings who encounter them. We are permeable to the very instruments we devise, and our capacity to imagine alternatives begins inside that permeability. The most radical gesture may therefore be an interruption of automatic legibility, an insistence upon the unclassified remainder that refuses conversion into an action signal. Such a remainder includes hesitation and contradiction, along with solidarities that cannot be inferred from a face or priced from a pattern of movement. Paglen concludes by reminding us that material existence does not wait for our consent: “Fires, floods, hurricanes, collapsing ice shelves, and mass extinctions do not care at all whether we believe in them or not. Some superpositions cannot be sustained.” This sentiment restores a necessary resistance to a world seemingly made of prompts. Reality can be wounded without being persuaded. What haunts this book, finally, is the prospect of an eye so perfectly trained to act that it can no longer encounter anything beyond its instructions. To see otherwise may require us to preserve a faculty machines cannot be commanded to value, the capacity to be changed by what we have failed to recognize.

Charlie Rauh: Amizdel (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

“One tries to cure the signs of growth, to exorcise them, as if they were devils, when really they might be angels of annunciation.”
–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

To receive the world is to allow it to leave a mark. In Amizdel, Charlie Rauh approaches that vulnerability as a practice of attention, gathering a year’s worth of memories and encounters into a record of learning to remain open. His introduction locates a quiet source of strength in the willingness to accept what others offer and to live with the knowledge that hardship may arrive as unexpectedly as beauty. The question guiding this undertaking is how such openness might sustain us through both. Beneath it stirs another, more elusive inquiry into what becomes of the self when its conditions waver at the edge of uncertainty.

The book takes its title from Hildegard von Bingen’s word for “armor,” preserved in her enigmatic lingua ignota, or “unknown language.” The indeterminate purpose of that language gives Rauh’s reflections a suggestive point of departure, allowing protection itself to remain a question. Awareness and connection become ways of inhabiting an exposure whose terms we cannot dictate. Such armor acquires the delicacy of a membrane, carrying the world’s pressure into the being it encloses. Beautifully illustrated by his sister, Christina Rauh Fishburne, Amizdel also brings a familial dimension to this exploration. The collaboration places an actual relationship within the book’s meditation on receptivity, giving its concern for others a material presence before any philosophy can float free of the hands that made it.

The only way to find what is lost is to become lost oneself. This profound lesson, learned early in a childhood anecdote shared as the book’s opening, sets the tone for everything that follows. A mother drops a coin into the grass to locate a missing necklace, entering the object’s predicament through an imaginative adjustment of scale. The mind kneels until the blades become corridors. Drawn from that formless yet inexhaustible wellspring we call consciousness, Rauh’s subsequent contemplations repeatedly loosen the coordinates and the proverbial map on which they are plotted. Their mystical irony resides in the compass that continues to guide him, equally immaterial yet central to his existence. Direction emerges from intimacy with what has eluded him. Later, his missing keys reappear during the clearing of an apartment destroyed by fire. Their recovery leaves the destruction intact, placing a difficult limit on the consolations of seeing. A revelation can illuminate the ashes without returning them to wood.

“We are born explorers,” he writes, locating our questioning nature in the accumulations of thought and experience through which answers become possible. In that sense, reminders and remainders approach synonymy, bringing something important to the beds of our internal gardens. Seeds and fully grown plants occupy different moments in a continuum whose circumference we cannot see; even the smallest remnant carries a subterranean proposition about what may grow. Yet exploration also depends on the stillness to enjoy having no destination. Rauh’s practice of sitting at successive bus stops, leaving each when the bus arrives, quietly detaches waiting from the obligation to board. The interval acquires a life independent of whatever might end it. This “joyful waiting” is where we so often forget to dwell, having surrendered the present to the appointment it is supposed to keep.

Such a practice helps explain the book’s form. Its longer essays give way to fragments that allow impressions and aphorisms to become entities unto themselves, endowed with a cognition and will of their own. Not every story needs a biographical fingerprint. Whether meditating on flight or mortality, Rauh becomes less securely positioned at the center of his observations as they compound. A window can have a perspective; a room can shelter a silence that survives its occupant. The recurrent second person further unsettles the distinction between observer and observed, admitting the reader into an address whose original recipient may remain unknowable. Intimacy gathers around this uncertainty. To enter the conversation is to accept that some part of it will always belong elsewhere, beyond the reader’s appetite for disclosure.

The shoreline offers a particularly charged version of that encounter. In Ocean, Rauh recalls his residency on Captiva Island and the music that emerged from his proximity to the sea. These liminal zones of contact are nature’s affordances, places where the immense permits our touch without becoming manageable. Memory washes into composition, and the body discovers how readily an invitation can contain danger. His nighttime floating eventually enters into conversation with Hans Scholl’s writing and resistance to Nazism. The distance between voluntarily confronting uncertainty and suffering political persecution resists lyrical compression, giving the meditation its moral charge. Beauty can demand an answer from someone who has every reason to feel abandoned by it. “Courage is not the absence of fear,” Rauh notes, “but the disarming of its paralysis through love.” Against our habit of turning prayers into contracts, the sentence leaves courage vulnerable to an outcome it cannot purchase.

Grief makes that vulnerability more intimate. Certain emotional registers cast permanent shadows on our lives that never quite capitulate to the sun’s willful shine. Rauh’s recollection of Connie, who taught him to take pleasure in breathing, gives this permanence a corporeal articulation. Her lesson survives within the action of a chest rising and falling, allowing the absent teacher to participate in another breath. For a musician, the implications extend beyond technique: sound begins in a body’s willingness to make room. Remembrance, however, is a conscious act that must be brought forth through intention. Habit can carry what the mind has ceased to name, and attention grants that inheritance a moment of audibility. Somewhere beneath the ribs, an unfinished instruction continues opening its small door.

In thinking about and through time, Rauh attends to rhythms we cannot control. Morning arrives with a relentlessness that complicates our declarations of allegiance to the night, while the same hour holds utterly different lives within it. His personal ceremonies, whether lighting a candle or watching people pass by, are hugged by the rising sun without acquiring a claim on everyone else’s experience. This distinction becomes especially consequential when Morning turns to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters. The recurring dawn meets a voice formed under enslavement, and the act of beginning another day takes on an ethical demand that exceeds the pleasures of illumination. Rauh hears a summons to creative responsibility. What will we make with the life that has reached us? The question gathers force from the particular person asking it, whose circumstances enter the light and change its meaning.

The most important things in these pages can only be fully understood in the moment of their unfolding because they belong to those who experience them. In that way, they have a voice. Old rooms retain a character that cannot be replicated elsewhere, just as these curious assemblages of mind and body that house what we call “souls” acquire a withered architecture all their own. Rauh’s imagined visits to sparsely furnished interiors preserve the darkness in their corners, granting even an unoccupied space a measure of privacy. Fishburne’s portraits offer another form of this restraint. Faces held within quiet borders, some edged in gold, remain distinctly themselves amid the prose’s more fluid intimacies. Their presence gives the book’s spiritual inheritance a human countenance. The voice of creation may be deliberate, but it doesn’t shout into our ears; sometimes it waits until we have ceased furnishing every silence with ourselves.

Even in the absence of a promise of glory, something keeps us striving, with beginnings that carry endings in their hearts. The brief pieces gathered under Cloud-Moving Wind-Filled place that impulse, each an overture to an opera that never sings, whose unperformed passages accumulate within the reader. “I know what you are after,” Rauh observes, “and it isn’t glory or money. You are after a mortar.” The word holds the binding agent beside the weapon, bringing the longing for cohesion into dangerous proximity with the wish to destroy whatever threatens it. Wholeness, too, can harbor aggression. In the adjacent Curious Architect, building begins with the willingness to ask how things hold together. One senses a “mysterious architect” working through these pages, although the structure remains exposed to the desires of whoever inhabits it. The book’s armor must contend with the violence concealed inside our own hopes for protection.

That complication becomes harder to evade in Recollections, where Rauh’s tenderness passes through morally unsettled terrain. In Shoulders, an apparent rescue develops the momentum of a getaway, only to leave the narrator questioning what he has done. Good intentions survive here with their authority diminished. Elsewhere, an emptied dwelling fills with ghosts the speaker acknowledges having created, and departure requires him to sit among them until their work is finished. The uncanny gives memory a laboring body, capable of resisting the meanings we would assign it. These passages leave pieces of unfinished futures and unfinished pasts needing time to sit and ruminate. Their darkness deepens the earlier invitation to receive, as another person’s suffering may enter our lives without becoming available to our preferred story of ourselves.

Near the close of I Don’t Live Near the Fairgrounds Anymore, a misspelled name bears the weight of an attachment language could never quite preserve. The spaces between its letters become places where love and loss unravel, carrying the ache of everything a name can summon and everything it cannot contain. Here the opening search for a necklace acquires a more difficult afterlife. Some absences will remain beyond the reach of the most attentive hand. History is where secrets are buried, and eventually we contribute our own to the soil. We feel heard in the unwritten blankness around them, where our own unfinished lives can settle for a moment. The compass continues its inaudible turning. In the garden beneath the page, a seed holds open the dark.

Alan Pasqua: My New Old Friend

| Tyran Grillo

Time has a peculiar way of inhabiting music, gathering in the hollows between notes and returning through melodies whose origins have long since dissolved into memory. For pianist Alan Pasqua, whose career has traversed the incandescent frontiers of jazz fusion and the intimate architectures of acoustic improvisation, such temporal hauntings find exquisite expression in My New Old Friend. Having studied with Jaki Byard and joined Tony Williams’ New Lifetime following a fateful Carnegie Hall encounter in 1975, Pasqua later lent his harmonic imagination to Bob Dylan and Santana. His celebrated “Proto-Cosmos” remains an emblem of that earlier volcanic vocabulary. Yet beneath the electricity, another language had been quietly ripening, one whose silences carry the sediment of entire lifetimes. Released by Cryptogramophone in 2005, My New Old Friend gathers six originals and five lovingly reconsidered standards into a meditation on remembrance’s peculiar elasticity.

The title acquires particular poignancy through the intertwined histories of its musicians. Pasqua and drummer Peter Erskine first crossed paths at Indiana University, sharing a Bloomington farmhouse in 1971 before their careers carried them across the expanding cartographies of jazz. Bassist Darek Oles, a more recent collaborator, completes this convergence of histories. Recorded at Conway Studios in Hollywood during sessions spanning 2003 and 2004, the album was conceived with almost devotional attention to detail. Pasqua even brought his handcrafted Yamaha S6 into the studio to ensure a particular sound. Oles supplies a supple gravitational center while Erskine’s exquisitely calibrated touch allows rhythm to breathe beyond its own circumference. Companionship becomes a form of listening whose deepest syntax is the freedom to discover something previously unimagined in someone already known.

“You Must Believe in Spring” opens with a lushly articulated piano introduction, an act of emotional architecture whose foundations materialize beneath our feet as we enter. Pasqua’s touch is sensitive yet texturally bold, every harmonic choice carrying a quiet inevitability. Erskine skips with the grace of a waterskater while Oles swings through the gaps in the trees on a vine of utterly melodic fortitude. “All the Things You Are” brings a more spirited gait, Erskine’s cymbals scintillating at the edges of Pasqua’s effortless invention. The trio plays as though it had written the tune, its changes passing through their hands as naturally as breath. “Body and Soul,” meanwhile, locates nostalgia at the microscopic level. You cannot see it with the naked eye, yet you feel it unmistakably in the clothed heart. Pasqua’s solo dips a tentative toe into a river down which the trio’s vessel has been gliding all along. Such hesitation, held within an otherwise unbroken trust, becomes its own measure of beauty. Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” spreads its soft, creamy abundance into every nook and cranny of the imagination until it ceases to be visible. Even “Smile,” the balladic offramp, offers something considerably grander than a fond farewell, its tenderness ambulating with an unsettling lucidity.

Pasqua’s originals sit comfortably alongside these tried-and-true companions. From the opening gestures of “Barcelona,” we are in masterful hands, guided through fluid changes of light and scenery. Its urban touch is wonderfully unobtrusive, and Oles’s bubbling solo wells up from someplace deeper than the street beneath it. “Vienna” opens with another masterful introduction, verdant with the tenderness of an embrace postponed for years. As it slides into a mid-tempo anthem, the city of the title seems to surrender its physical coordinates and become an address within.

“Highway 14” extends into motion, with Lina Brunkell’s wordless vocals lending the open road a reflective sheen that doubles the sky along with the possibilities of arrival. Pasqua floats with the ease of a leaf surrendered to its own trajectory. Underneath, Oles shoulders much of the melodic weight while Erskine quietly clears the path, each rhythmic gesture offering reassurance without dictating a destination. The road becomes an unwritten sentence belonging equally to departure and anticipation. Through Brunkell’s voice, language itself momentarily forgets its vocation to explain and evokes the peculiar eloquence of having nothing to prove.

The title track is a timeless ballad seemingly created in the moment of its telling. Pasqua’s organic soloing traces the fine line between what has been remembered and what is being invented, until the two become inseparable. “One More Once” occupies a more askew rhythmic terrain, every slide and sudden turn handled with such mastery that even its darker shades feel necessary. Pasqua’s gorgeous runs find every necessary current in the rhythm section. “Stick Slap,” meanwhile, is a romping good time that speaks in smiles, displaying the trio’s coherence at its most exuberant. Even here, virtuosity never becomes a contest for the foreground.

I am admittedly late to the party in placing this recording on my virtual turntable, but perhaps lateness is precisely the point. Those who come to Between Sound and Space for more than ECM should by all means seek this one out. Few recordings make generosity sound quite so rigorously intelligent. What stays with me most is the quiet ethical possibility concealed in the album’s title. To call someone an old friend is to acknowledge a history; to call that same person new is to admit that history can never exhaust a human being. Knowledge of another person can become a beautiful form of captivity. Pasqua and his companions open the door of that captivity from within, allowing recognition to remain open to surprise. Perhaps this is the most difficult kind of fidelity: granting those we love the right to exceed the person we have made of them. The music poses a question whose consequences reach into every human encounter. What if we listened to strangers with the patience we reserve for old friends, and to old friends with the astonishment owed to strangers?