Books

ECM New Series: A Compendium

| Tyran Grillo

“I can imagine the New Series in the form of a journey: there is a route mapped out, but it is open to contingency; it does not insist on the shortest or most direct road. It allows for detours that might lead into totally different areas from the original plan.”
–Manfred Eicher

There exists a particular sensibility in recorded music that refuses spectacle, distrusts haste, and listens for what emerges only when attention is sustained. It is an ethos built on patience, on the belief that sound is not merely an event but an environment and that listening is as much a moral as an aesthetic act. Within this sensibility, music is not asked to announce itself loudly or justify its presence through novelty or authority. Instead, it is allowed to exist in a state of becoming. The Compendium at hand arises from this worldview. It does not rush to explain or persuade. It invites the reader into a space where time slows, where artistic intent is inseparable from restraint, and where the deepest meanings are often carried by what is nearly imperceptible.

Producer Manfred Eicher understands classical music not as a fixed inheritance but as a living terrain shaped by memory, silence, and risk. It softens the rigid hierarchies that separate genres, eras, and disciplines, favoring instead a continuity that flows between medieval chant and contemporary composition, between written score and spontaneous intuition, between the concert hall and the solitary act of listening. The guiding conviction is that music’s truth lies not in classification but in presence. How a note is played, how a phrase is allowed to decay, how a recording captures air, distance, and stillness matters more than the lineage of the material itself. The book emerges as an artifact of this conviction, shaped by the same attention to space, texture, and inwardness that has long defined the sound world it chronicles. It stands not as a monument but as a threshold, inviting readers into a cinematic way of hearing.

To situate this volume properly requires a widening of perspective, an understanding of how recorded classical music has historically been framed and mediated. For much of the 20th century, the dominant classical record labels functioned as custodians of authority. Houses such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and Philips constructed a sonic canon through monumental interpretations, star conductors, and a reverence for definitive statements. Their achievements were immense and lasting, yet their aesthetic tended toward the architectural. Performances were designed to stand as reference points, recordings as polished monuments to permanence, history rendered stable and self-assured.

Against this backdrop, the New Series emerged not in opposition but in quiet divergence. Under the wider umbrella of ECM Records, it proposed a fundamentally different relationship between music, performer, and listener. Classical music was no longer approached as a preserved inheritance to be polished and displayed but as a living continuum, shaped by fragility, curiosity, and permeability. The New Series allowed sound to be influenced by poetry, film, sacred ritual, folk memory, and contemporary abstraction without anxiety over category or lineage. It invited unfamiliar accents into familiar forms and treated unfamiliar forms with the same care traditionally reserved for the canon.

The Compendium mirrors this orientation with remarkable fidelity. Its structure resists hierarchy, favoring proximity over ranking, conversation over proclamation. Rather than reinforcing the idea of repertoire as a fixed body of works to be mastered, it presents classical music as an ongoing exchange among composers, performers, and listeners across time and geography. Each page represents a frame in a larger, evolving montage. In doing so, the book articulates a philosophy that classical music remains most vital when it is allowed to remain unfinished, receptive, and alive.

At the center of this vision stands Eicher, not as a figure of authority in the conventional sense but as a listener whose curatorial instinct has quietly reshaped the conditions under which music comes into being. His words from a 1986 interview provide more than an epigraph for this review. They function as its axis. When he describes the New Series as a journey with a mapped route that remains open to contingency, he gestures toward an understanding of artistic practice that values deviation as deeply as intention. Progress is not measured by efficiency or arrival but by attentiveness to what reveals itself along the way, detours the very means through which meaning is discovered.

This conception of music as an exploratory act underlies every page of this volume. One senses its affinities with interior monologues, the long take in cinema, the negative space of modern painting, and the instinctive pacing of the stage. Music, in this framework, does not exist in isolation. It absorbs light, text, gesture, and silence, allowing each to subtly alter its contour. The Compendium reflects this sensibility without didacticism. It does not attempt to persuade through argument or analysis. Its structure mirrors the listening experience the New Series has long cultivated, where coherence arises gradually, and conviction emerges not from assertion but from accumulated attention.

The journey begins, with a sense of inevitability rather than chronology, in Arvo Pärt. His music, austere yet luminous, does more than inaugurate the New Series. It establishes a gravity field around which much of what follows seems to orbit. Pärt’s work reintroduced stillness as a radical force in modern music, restoring silence as something charged with ethical and spiritual weight. Thus, the label’s deeper preoccupations with time, devotion, and resonance come into focus.

From there, the book proceeds composer by composer, each chapter opening onto a distinct interior landscape while remaining visibly connected to a larger constellation. Figures such as György Kurtág, Giya Kancheli, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Alexander Knaifel, and Veljo Tormis are presented not as representatives of national schools or stylistic movements but as participants in a shared inquiry into memory, loss, and the fragility of form. Many of these composers write music that feels as though it is listening backward, attentive to echoes of vanishing traditions, while remaining unmistakably contemporary. Their work often proceeds by subtraction rather than accumulation, trusting sparse gestures, broken phrases, and restrained dynamics to carry emotional and historical weight.

Taken together, these composers suggest an alternative modernism, one less concerned with rupture or provocation than with remembrance and inwardness. Their music asks how history survives in sound, how trauma, exile, and cultural erosion might be transmuted into quiet persistence. The Compendium allows these affinities to emerge organically, without forcing comparison, inviting the reader to sense the shared temperature of their work over technical minutiae.

The scope widens further with composers whose practices actively dissolve the boundaries between genres and disciplines. Heinz Holliger and Heiner Goebbels bring to the New Series a heightened theatrical and literary awareness, where music becomes inseparable from text, gesture, and spatial experience. Their contributions underscore the label’s openness to works that exist as events rather than objects. In a different but equally expansive way, Meredith Monk articulates an aesthetic grounded in directness, purity, asymmetry, and transparency. Her music, born of the physicality of the voice and the ceremony of performance, seems to distill the label’s approach into human breath and movement, reminding us that experimentation need not sacrifice intimacy.

Alongside these figures stand composers such as Gavin Bryars, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Thomas Larcher, Dobrinka Tabakova, and Eleni Karaindrou, whose work stands slightly askew from prevailing trends. Their music is neither doctrinaire nor opportunistic. It operates according to an inner necessity, attentive to lyricism, atmosphere, and emotional clarity without yielding to sentimentality. The New Series has provided a home for such voices precisely because it values conviction over conformity, allowing composers to develop long arcs of work free from the pressures of fashion or institutional expectations.

The presence of each is deepened by carefully chosen quotations reflecting on the act of composition itself, paired with portrait photographs and images from recording sessions. These reveal the human conditions under which their creations come into being, the solitude, concentration, doubt, and patience required to bring sound into focus. One senses the rehearsal room, the studio, the long hours of listening and adjustment. In this way, the book affirms one of its central truths: that modern music, at its most vital, is not an abstract system but a lived practice, shaped by time, attention, and the enduring vulnerability of those who make it.

Equally vital to this story are the performers, whose interpretations run through the New Series in quiet refrain. They are not presented as virtuoso personalities imposing themselves upon the music but as mediators who allow its inner logic to speak with clarity and force. Their artistry lies in restraint as much as command.

Artists such as Gidon Kremer, András Schiff, and Kim Kashkashian exemplify this ethic through an almost ascetic devotion to sound itself. Their performances are marked by transparency of texture and a shedding of rhetorical excess, allowing even the most fragile or fragmentary music to retain its integrity. In the case of Keith Jarrett, whose presence bridges the worlds of improvisation and composed music, the New Series reveals how attentiveness can dissolve distinctions between genres, bringing the same intensity of listening to both the written score and being in the moment. Conductors such as Dennis Russell Davies further extend this approach, shaping large forms with a sensitivity to balance and pacing that privileges inner coherence over outward drama.

The ensemble performances documented in the Compendium deepen this perspective. Groups like The Hilliard Ensemble and Trio Mediaeval bring centuries-old repertoire into dialogue with contemporary composition, revealing unexpected continuities across time through their vocal blend and disciplined stillness. The Danish String Quartet exemplifies how chamber music, when approached with collective intelligence and trust, can achieve a rare balance of precision and vulnerability. In these performances, risk is not theatrical but structural, emerging from the willingness to expose the music’s quietest tensions.

Together, these musicians embody the New Series ideal, where lucidity replaces polish and attentiveness supplants display. Their work suggests that, at its highest level, performance is morally shaped. The Compendium honors them not as interpreters of a fixed tradition but as active participants in a living one, reminding us that the future of classical music depends as much on how it is experienced in the moment as on the notes preserved on the page.

As a physical object, the Compendium embodies the visual and tactile intelligence that has long distinguished ECM’s aesthetic. Its design speaks in a measured voice, austere yet quietly radiant, disciplined without austerity for its own sake. White space is not an absence but a field of attention. Typography, sequencing, and image placement appear calibrated to slow the reader’s pace, encouraging a form of engagement that mirrors the label’s decades-long listening habits. One does not skim this book. One dwells within it, returning to pages as one might return to a recording, attentive to shifts of mood and emphasis that only reveal themselves over time.

In this way, the book becomes an extension of the recordings themselves, another site where listening is shaped by care. It aligns with an idea of art that does not rush to occupy the foreground but waits for the reader or listener to meet it halfway. The reward for this patience is depth, not as density of information but as depth of presence.

In the end, ECM New Series: A Compendium stands as far more than an anniversary publication or institutional summation. It is a sustained meditation on how classical music might remain fully alive in the present without forfeiting its inwardness or historical gravity. By expanding the very conditions under which music is performed, recorded, and heard, the New Series has quietly altered the expectations surrounding classical sound. It has shown that innovation need not announce itself loudly, that progress can unfold through refinement, patience, and a deepening of attention.

This book captures that achievement with a humility that feels inseparable from its subject. It neither proclaims a legacy nor attempts to fix it in place. Instead, it reflects a way of thinking about music as a continuing conversation with time, one that values listening as an act of openness rather than mastery. Like enduring works of literature and art, the New Series does not seek to dominate history or escape it. It listens to it, answers it, and leaves space for what has yet to arrive.

Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM

| Tyran Grillo

Horizons Touched

It’s all our music.
–Robert Frost, “The Self-Seeker”

I. A Living Archive

Few record labels compel us to approach them in any way other than chronologically. ECM is one of them. Its catalogue does not merely document music made; it charts ways of listening learned, unlearned, and learned again. Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM arrives, then, not as a monument erected after the fact but as an attempt to take measure of a phenomenon still in motion, to listen back without closing the ear to what has yet to sound.

The importance of this book, devotedly published by Granta Books in 2007, lies precisely here. Rather than offering a definitive account of ECM, it gathers voices, memories, and reflections in a way that mirrors the label’s own refusal of finality. It does not summarize so much as resonate. In doing so, it becomes something rarer than an institutional history: a field of attentiveness, an act of collective listening directed both backward and forward. What is preserved is sensibility over consensus.

In his introduction, Steve Lake rightly calls ECM a “work-in-progress.” Indeed, ECM is not a repository of completed statements but a living archive in which the contributions of everyone who makes it a reality function as vital organs within a larger, thriving body. The questions posed throughout the book are as follows: How does one listen to a past that refuses to settle into style, school, or doctrine? How does one write about music that has always positioned itself slightly ahead of its own reception?

Before ECM and its leadership under bassist-turned-producer Manfred Eicher, no one had thought of space in jazz in quite the same way. Through Eicher’s early work with engineers Martin Wieland and Jan Erik Kongshaug, the recording studio itself emerged as an unspoken player, an active participant rather than a neutral container. Light entered sound. Atmosphere became structural. Silence was no longer an absence but a condition. Yet even this often-cited “ECM sound” resists fixation, not because it lacks identity but because it repels reduction.

Given that so many locations, musicians, and traditions have passed through the label, to distill its ethos into a single style would be to flatten precisely what has given it life. As Eicher admitted in a 1999 interview, “All that can be really said about the ‘ECM sound’ at this point is that the sound that you hear is the sound that we like.” From this deceptively modest admission unfolds an expansive reality. What began as a jazz imprint grew far beyond the conventions of genre, making room for folk music, film soundtracks, electro-acoustic alchemy, and, with ECM New Series, classical streams grafted into the same current. Even there, the borders remain porous: Jan Garbarek improvising alongside the Hilliard Ensemble; curated excerpts from a Heiner Goebbels sound installation; Keith Jarrett playing Bach’s French Suites on harpsichord.

Horizons Touched matters because it understands this permeability not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be honored. Enabled by over 100 contributors, the book presents itself as an “oral history,” though the term hardly captures its scope. What emerges instead is a polyphonic portrait of a label that has always worked obliquely through implication, atmosphere, and trust. Like the music it documents, the book does not insist. It invites. And in doing so, it affirms ECM as a listening practice still unfolding.

II. Seeing as Listening

It is telling that, following Lake’s opening statement, the essays do not begin with Eicher but with “Our Music: Synopsis for a Film” by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The filmmakers speak of seeing as listening, and few in their art would know better. This inversion of sensory hierarchy sets the tone for what follows.

Eicher’s essay, “The Periphery and the Centre,” originally delivered as a speech upon receiving the Kultureller Ehrenpreis of the City of Munich in 2005, continues this meditation on margins and essence. He speaks of the ECM office in Munich, located in what he calls “a no man’s land of industrial culture” at the periphery of things. Having been there myself, I can attest to its uncanny contradiction of placelessness and situatedness. Yet Eicher cautions against romanticizing such things: “We must never settle too comfortably at the periphery—the margin should only be a source, a spot from which to grasp the essence of the centre.”

His reflections braid together formative years in music school and the cinema, early encounters with Godard and others yielding a profound understanding of the overlaps between ears and eyes. For Eicher, atmosphere is not decorative but catalytic. “The atmosphere produced at a recording session,” he writes, “should be inimitable and awaken the desire to make changes or, where necessary, to improve and perfect.”

III. Redefining Tradition: European and Northern Voices

John Fordham’s “ECM and European Jazz” traces how figures like Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber became pioneers not by breaking with tradition but by redefining it as personally as possible. Weber’s admonition to his band—“you can play anything, as long as it doesn’t sound like jazz”—was a refusal of complacency. As Americans like Keith Jarrett, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny entered the fold and collaborated with European musicians, the sound expanded further. British artists such as Norma Winstone and John Taylor, alongside Kenny Wheeler in the influential Azimuth trio (with Ralph Towner welcomed into the circle), contributed to this widening field. Saxophonists John Surman—particularly in his solo recordings—and Evan Parker, with his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, ensured that the threat of typecasting never fully took hold.

On the mainland, artists like Louis Sclavis, Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stańko, and Miroslav Vitouš laid the groundwork for a new canon. And then there are the Scandinavians, whose presence Michael Tucker explores in “Northbound: ECM and ‘The Idea of North.’” What Tucker calls “a multi-hued Northern aura” begins with Afric Pepperbird, Garbarek’s historic recording with Terje Rypdal, Arild Andersen, and Jon Christensen. Yet this “North” is less a geographic persuasion than an idea taking shape in those who inhabit it or yearn toward it.

To my ears, few albums embody this sensibility more adroitly than Rypdal’s If Mountains Could Sing. But the Northern idea is not all cool washes and snowbound stillness. There is also unrest and existential fervor, as in the shamanic charge of Garbarek’s Visible World, which, despite its cool sheen, is rich with colorful flame. Even in the gentler worlds of Tord Gustavsen and Mathias Eick, there is a nomadism that never feels quite settled in its skin.

IV. Liminal Spaces and Less is More

This sense of in-betweenness finds articulate expression in Ivan Moody’s 2004 conversation with Jan Garbarek, “On Parallel Lines.” Garbarek speaks candidly about the difficulty critics have in placing his music. Jazz and classical camps alike often seem unsure how to approach it, leaving it to resound in a liminal space. “I consider myself extremely lucky,” Garbarek says, “because ECM already has a given audience, and they don’t really think of it as jazz or classical: it’s just a certain approach.”

Their dialogue ranges across questions of collaboration with musicians from other traditions, converging on a shared belief that constraints can be the most liberating conditions for creation. “I only seem to have dreams when I’m awake,” Garbarek remarks, a line that feels like an unofficial ECM motto.

V. New Series: Shadows, Voices, and Reinvention

The ECM New Series emerges throughout the book not as an offshoot but as an intensification of the label’s core ethos. John Potter’s “Early Music Discoveries and Experiments” marvels at Eicher’s uncanny ability to bring together musicians, ideas, and inspirations no one else would think to combine—most famously in Officium, but also in the Dowland Project.

Helen Wallace’s “Musicians of the New Series” observes that “the musicians who make ECM recordings are shadowy presences.” (My own early encounters with the New Series included Paul Giger’s Chartres. I remember trying to imagine what he looked like, how he moved while playing. When a clearer photograph finally appeared on Schattenwelt, it felt like seeing, through time, a mythical figure brought briefly into focus.) Wallace also notes the lack of musician biographies in the CD booklets, emphasizing that these recordings arise not from contracts but from shared visions and relationships with living composers illuminated by deeply human interpretations, resting in a nest of empathy.

Peter Rüedi’s “Continuity in Change: The Metamorphoses of Keith Jarrett” goes on to frame genius as a state of constant reformation rather than a sustained pinnacle. Jarrett’s “many-sidedness,” of “supernatural proportions,” exemplifies this restlessness. Rüedi speaks of the hymnic quality shared by Jarrett’s music and ECM: an ember that glows with varying degrees of warmth, sometimes sparking fires that take on lives of their own beyond the hearth.

VI. Free Playing, American Roots, and the Canvas Without an Edge

Josef Woodard’s “ECM and US Jazz” reminds us that the label has always been “a source of cohesion” for American artists and a further corrective to simplistic notions of the “ECM sound.” The label’s genesis lay with Mal Waldron, and figures like the Art Ensemble of Chicago brought incendiary free-jazz energy into its orbit. Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Ralph Towner, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Peter Erskine, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Steve Swallow, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, and Charles Lloyd all testify to a lineage of hard-edged expressivity as much as lyric spaciousness.

In “The Free Matrix,” Steve Lake’s interview with Eicher, free playing again emerges as a foundational principle. Eicher recalls early encounters with Paul Bley and identifies a “special electricity” shared by artists as varied as Glenn Gould, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett—an ability to act as “an inspired catalyst whatever the context.” Music, Eicher says, is “a canvas without an edge.” He recounts the genesis of the label’s name, inspired by Werner Goldschmidt’s Wergo series and Stockhausen’s From the Seven Days, leading him to imagine loosening borders through the idea of an “edition” (borrowed from the world of visual art) of contemporality. Thus, Edition of Contemporary Music was born. He likens the label to a sea: “A continuous movement of undercurrents and unexpected drifts… But sometimes the sea is tranquil, and stays tranquil.”

Keith Jarrett’s essay, “Inside Out: Thoughts on Free Playing,” deepens this philosophy. He distinguishes between artists who treat nothingness as lack and those who understand it as a state “pregnant with everything.” His notion of having “accidents on purpose” feels like a quiet manifesto for improvisation.

VII. Forms, Covers, Folkways, and Modernist Echoes

ECM’s visual identity receives eloquent treatment in Lars Müller’s “The ECM Cover.” Müller sees the label as transforming its musical philosophy into the realm of vision. The covers rarely illustrate the music directly, yet they exist in harmony with it—two verses from the same poem, not mirror images.

Karl Lippegaus, in “Colours, Densities, Forms,” traces how ECM reshaped folk music through artists such as Egberto Gismonti, Anouar Brahem, Lena Willemark, Savina Yannatou, Eleni Karaindrou, Gianluigi Trovesi, Shankar, and Dino Saluzzi. He also recounts asking Eicher why ECM albums open with five seconds of silence. Eicher laughed: “People need time to sit down, don’t they?”

Paul Griffiths’s “Against the Grain: Modernist Voices” reframes modernism not as rupture but as continuity. For example, in Thomas Demenga’s fifteen-year traversal of the Bach cello suites—paired with works by Holliger, Veress, and Isang Yun—Bach emerges as modern for his time, just as modern works echo the past. Griffiths writes lovingly of Holliger and Kurtág as poets, a lineage that includes the spoken-word forays of Bruno Ganz (to say nothing of Griffiths’s own).

Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s “All Roads Lead to Bach” both confirms and dismantles Bach’s mythic status. Bach was no passive vessel of divine inspiration but a laborious musical scientist whose work fell out of favor for decades. Returning to Bach, Jungheinrich argues, is an anti-Romantic gesture, one that resonates deeply with jazz musicians like Jarrett. Yet ultimately, the metaphor inverts itself: not all roads lead back to Bach; they stem from him outward into space and time.

VIII. Instruments, Futures, and the Listener’s Life

John Cratchley’s “ECM and the Guitar” charts the instrument’s breadth across the label—from Abercrombie, Towner, Connors, Frisell, Tibbetts, Rypdal, and Metheny to figures like Keith Rowe, Mick Goodrick, Derek Bailey, and Christy Doran—extending into the next generation with Jacob Young.

John Kelman’s “Present and Future Songs” characterizes ECM as a place of discovery. Alongside its mainstays, it has consistently welcomed new voices: Trygve Seim, Christian Wallumrød, Tord Gustavsen, Savina Yannatou. What unites them, Kelman writes, is not style but vision: “All hold humanity as paramount; all ask that music be accepted as a contradiction, engaging perfectionist ideal and practical imperfection.”

Geoff Dyer’s “Editions of Contemporary Me” offers a listener’s diary, his discovery of ECM entwined with the formation of his inner life. It makes me nostalgic for my own early listening sessions with friends, before digital fragmentation fractured albums into isolated tracks.

Further interviews, such as Griffiths and Lake’s with Eicher, reaffirm that the New Series was never a departure, only a continuation of ECM’s inner spirit. Thomas Steinfeld’s “Words and Music” explores the “aesthetical alliances” listeners inevitably draw across the label’s vast terrain.

IX. Voices, Engineers, and the Hand Holding the Key

Interleaved among the essays, Horizons Touched offers biographical sketches and first-person statements from ECM’s musicians, each a small window that opens onto a whole climate. These fragments do not merely annotate the label’s history; they humanize its method. They remind us that ECM’s continuity is not a doctrine but a chain of encounters: one musician hearing another across a room, across a record, across years, then walking away altered.

Jan Garbarek’s recollections of meeting Don Cherry glow with this catalytic force. Cherry’s folk sensibilities did not function as ornament or exotic garnish; they sank into Garbarek’s musical bloodstream, shaping how the saxophonist would understand melody as something older than genre, something carried like a story rather than “played” like a role. John Surman, too, appears not as a solitary figure descending fully formed but as someone who fell in with the Norwegian jazz scene by way of circumstance and gravity via Karin Krog’s quintet with Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen, Garbarek, and Terje Bjørklund—a scene, then, as a confluence of players finding shared weather.

The book is equally attentive to the invisible labor that turns vision into sound. Iro Haarla’s memories of bringing her partner Edward Vesala’s musical worlds to life are among the most moving examples. Vesala would sing ideas into a tape recorder—raw transmissions, half-formed, urgent—and Haarla would transcribe them, arrange them, translate the unrepeatable into something held and shared, using those recordings and other means of transmission. Here, creativity is shown not as solitary lightning but as an act of listening so deep it becomes architecture.

Generational echoes reverberate as well. Trygve Seim recalls his first encounter with Jan Garbarek—not in person, but through the spell of Eventyr, which set him on the path toward the saxophone at a time in his life when he was more interested in sports. That detail matters: it gives us the unmistakable sense of a life diverted by sound, a horizon touched early enough to become destiny.

From the New Series world, Kim Kashkashian offers a statement that feels like reassurance and challenge: the intense preparation of a recording is precisely when “preconceived notions are abandoned and the music is created anew.” ECM’s paradox—rigor as the gateway to freedom—finds proof in her fearless championing of Kurtág, Mansurian, Kancheli, and so many others, repertoire approached not as museum artifact but as living material, remade in the present tense. András Schiff appears, too, animated by a seeking spirit that never settles for attainment, spurring him toward greater interpretative levels, as if interpretation were not a finishing touch but an ethical pursuit, a way of staying in motion.

Anouar Brahem’s reflections widen the field again, returning us to that Godardian hinge where sight and sound exchange roles. He speaks of the silence that precedes image and the music that follows it, a dynamic mirrored in many bands along the ECM spectrum, where what is withheld becomes part of what is said, and where the breath before the phrase is meaning. Annette Peacock, in turn, expresses gratitude for Manfred Eicher, whose prophetic understanding of her essence became a leitmotif at ECM, less the discovery of a new artist than the recognition of someone already speaking in her own dialect, waiting for ears fluent enough to listen.

Several statements arrive like aphorisms—compact, paradoxical, strangely complete. Christian Wallumrød’s reflections on harmony and freedom turn composition and improvisation into mirror arts: “You write something because you couldn’t improvise it, and you improve something because it couldn’t be written.” Carla Bley’s slow, forward-thinking approach to making music is distilled into another truth earned over decades: “My solos usually end because I’ve had to abandon them.” Such statements suggest minds always moving ahead of what the hands can say.

Folk tradition is not treated as a quaint inheritance but as a living accumulation. Ale Möller speaks from deep knowledge, describing folk music as cumulative and locating ECM’s contribution in inward intensification, “increasing the inner density in music by reducing the external.” Dino Saluzzi sharpens this imperative by insisting on emotional sensitivity as the bridge to freedom: “Art doesn’t need muscles.” Robert Wilson’s poetic hymn to ECM (stylized as “Every Color Maginable”) extends the label into chromatic metaphysics. And Gidon Kremer, attentive to the bond between composer, performer, listener, articulates his love for Eicher’s vision of bringing them lucidly to us: “ECM stands for music intent on communicating something to us.”

Taken together, these voices form their own ensemble, less a supplement to the book than its beating heart. They do what ECM has always done at its best: place the “work” back into the work, the human back into myth, reminding us that the key is never merely the catalogue, the studio, the aesthetic.

The book closes not with an argument but with a gesture. Paul Griffiths raises a glass in the form of a prose poem written in Ophelian, in which meaning and music collapse into one another: “The key is in his hand. The key is his hand. There’s music in that hand.” The image lingers, unfinished, as if the act of letting go is where melody begins.

Leading up to this closing utterance is a dotted path of voices whose work has shaped ECM as surely as any score or improvisation. Reflections from photographers and visual artists—Roberto Masotti, Jan Jedlička, Jim Bengston, Mayo Bucher, Thomas Wunsch, Dieter Rehm—remind us that ECM’s sound has always traveled with an image, even when that image defies the conventions of illustration. Their contributions affirm the label’s belief that vision and music are parallel arts, each extending the other’s reach without collapsing into it.

Equally essential are the engineers, those who inhabit the threshold where intention becomes vibration. Peter Laenger, Jan Erik Kongshaug, James Farber, Stefano Amerio, and Gérard de Haro speak from within the studio’s invisible architecture, where listening is technical and moral. Amerio’s remark—“Recording for ECM means opening your mind to 360 degrees”—could stand as an epigraph for the enterprise. It names a practice of attention that is spherical rather than linear, attuned not only to what is played but to what surrounds it, precedes it, remains after it fades.

In ending this way, Horizons Touched refuses closure in the conventional sense. Instead, it disperses authorship, returning the music to the many hands that have shaped it, hands that frame images, tune microphones, adjust distances, wait for silence to speak. The key does not lock the door behind us. It stays in the hand, warm, provisional, ready to be passed on.

X. The Horizon Remains Open

Horizons Touched does not seek to close a circle. It leaves it slightly ajar, breathing. ECM has always seemed less concerned with preservation than with readiness for the next silence, the next alignment of breath and intention, the next sound that arrives without asking permission. To listen in this way is to relinquish certainty. It means accepting that meaning does not always announce itself, that music may resist immediate comprehension, that its most lasting truths often surface obliquely, long after the final note has faded. ECM’s legacy, if it can be called that, is not a fixed aesthetic but a discipline of sustained attention.

In this sense, the future of listening suggested here is neither utopian nor nostalgic. It is quieter, more demanding. It asks for patience in a culture of acceleration, for depth in a time of surfaces. It asks us to sit with ambiguity, to trust that what has not yet resolved may still be working on us, shaping us from within. The music does not rush to meet the listener; it waits. And in that waiting, something essential is restored.

Perhaps this is the true horizon being touched. Not a distant line toward which we move but a threshold we learn to inhabit. A space where sound and silence exchange roles, where intention loosens its grip, where listening becomes less about capture than encounter. The future implied by Horizons Touched is one in which music continues to arrive from unexpected directions, carrying with it traces of many worlds, yet asking only one thing in return: that we be present enough to hear it.

The horizon remains open because it must. To close it would be to mistake listening for possession. And ECM, at its heart, has never been about owning sound—only about making room for it, and trusting that what enters will know what to do next.

Dominic Pettman: Ghosting (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

Ghosting: On Disappearance is a treatise of nonbeing—or, perhaps more precisely, of unbeing. It is not merely about disappearance but about the existential tremors that ripple outward when presence collapses into absence. Placing his authorial thumb and forefinger on the touchscreen of this modern inevitability, Dominic Pettman enlarges its finer gradations across emotional, social, and technological contexts. He pinches and stretches the phenomenon until its translucent membrane reveals something more fundamental: that to vanish is to be human and that to experience the vanishing of another is to feel the sting of impermanence.

While the titular concept has haunted language for centuries through folklore, spirit mediums, and psychological estrangement, it has, in our present age, acquired a peculiarly digital valence. Now, “ghosting” refers most commonly to the quiet, sudden severance of connection between friends, lovers, or kin. The gesture is at once devastatingly simple and infinitely complex: a single tap on a block button, a name fading from a chat log, a conversation frozen by the unrequited ellipses on the book’s cover. Technology makes the act almost frictionless. We already interact daily with people who are physically absent, replaced instead by avatars, text bubbles, and disembodied voices. To ghost someone is merely to withdraw the illusion that they were ever really there to begin with.

Pettman calls ghosting “a form of symbolic suicide,” if not also of violence, a dual wound inflicted upon self and other. It kills the relationship from both sides, leaving the ghosted “gasping at the silent vehemence of the act.” In centuries past, a ghost was thought to be an uncomfortable presence: the whisper in the night, the chill in a boudoir. Today’s specters, however, are defined by the unread message, the unanswered call, the untraceable unfriend. The modern ghost mocks us not with its return but with its refusal to reappear. What once demanded ritual now requires only signal and silence.

Ghosting has become, Pettman suggests, a modern luxury of the unencumbered self, one that allows us to discard what feels burdensome with the efficiency of deleting a file. Yet, what artifacts remain in the wake of such apparently clean erasures? The book’s modest yet densely packed 110 pages attempt to reckon with these residues, drawing out the historical and technical filaments that bind our vanishing acts to canonical anxieties.

Pettman walks us associatively through a gallery of geist-types, beginning with romantic ghosting. Once upon a time, the rules of engagement in love were dictated by proximity and propriety; now, they are replaced by rules of disengagement. The refusal to reply, the closing of a digital door, has become the reigning leitmotif of romantic punctuation. Where a lover might once have ignored a letter and let absence ferment over time into torment, today’s nonresponse hits instantaneous and permanent. Yet, as Pettman notes, the old dynamic persists despite our devices.

Romance has always been a theatre of projection, a negotiation between the seen and the unseen, the flesh and its fantasy. For all our bodies’ sweat and trembling, it is the embellishment that endures. Even in love’s most carnal moment, that fleeting dissolution of self into the other, there is already the seed of absence: the tiny death, the out-of-body vanishing we call climax. How curious, then, that the purest expression of intimacy is also an act of ghosting, the self evaporating in the ecstasy of its own undoing.

Ghosting also bears the battle scars of gendered terrain. Though often cast as an act of cruelty, Pettman reminds us that ghosting can just as easily be a form of survival, a necessary defense against the predations of aggression, stalking, or abuse. It can be liberation or surrender, sanctuary or exile. Either possibility, he writes, makes us acutely aware of our dependence on the other, the fragile scaffolding of recognition upon which our identities are built. In an age when partners must fulfill multiple roles once distributed across an entire community, the dissolution of a relationship casts us into a kind of social purgatory, suspended between connection and isolation.

Pettman insists, too, that ghosting is not an anomaly but a revelation of what we have always been: phantoms speaking to one another through the veil of mortality. Every “forever” whispered in the heat of the proverbial moment carries the irony of death; every “I love you” is also an elegy. Love itself unfolds under the shadow of the crypt. Perhaps this is why its rituals resemble religion, as both court devotion and doubt in equal measure, laying faith on the altar of inevitable loss.

I would add, by way of illustration, Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, a love story indelibly marked by absence. Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), presumed dead after a plane crash, clings to a pocket watch containing his lover’s photograph, a relic of connection that fuels his will to live. When he returns after surviving for four years alone on a deserted island, he finds life has moved on without him; his beloved has remarried, rendering him the rarest kind of ghost, one who walks among the living, uninvited. His resurrection is itself a disappearance, a return that negates the meaning of home.

When lovers become projection screens for our own incomplete scripts, separation becomes not only likely but inevitable. The one left behind suffers not merely the withdrawal of a person but of the narrative that sustained them. In our culture of curated selves, ghosting has even acquired a perverse glamour as a badge of autonomy. One might recall Elaine Benes’s “spongeworthy” calculus from Seinfeld: who is worth the risk, the effort, the finite resource of bodily attention? Ghosting may be seen as a reversal of this privilege, a self-anointed freedom to choose extracourse over intercourse.

How, then, does one navigate the 50 shades of this phenomenon in an ecosystem already saturated with specters? As Pettman observes, “The paradox of the streaming age applies also to love: there are a million shows waiting to be watched, and yet none of them seem worth committing to.” In such a world, ghosting is less an exception than a rite of passage, a sacrament of connection where fulfillment is as fleeting as a notification bubble.

From romance, Pettman moves to the familial and the platonic. Here, the stakes deepen. To be ghosted by a coworker is unfortunate; to be ghosted by a child is practically biblical. In the age of ideological polarization, even the Thanksgiving table becomes a séance for the missing. The empty chair may symbolize courage to one and betrayal to another. Ghosting thus becomes political, echoing across generations and belief systems.

Professional and social ghosting occupy the book’s latter thrust, and here Pettman’s insights cut to the bone. Having once taught as a professor, I recognize the spectral economy of intellectual labor, the endless treadmill of unacknowledged effort and unreciprocated outreach. In graduate school, “imposter syndrome” was our ironic communion, a collective haunting where each scholar feared being the least real presence in the room. Every unanswered email, every “no reply” rejection, each job committee that never called back—all were tiny funerals for the self. Eventually, I chose to ghost the profession before it could continue to ghost me, if only to preserve a flicker of something to call my own.

Of course, ghosting is by no means confined to ivory towers. It infiltrates every professional exchange: clients disappearing mid-project, employers denying promotion for no apparent reason, friendships fading in inbox drafts. Even places ghost us: favorite restaurants that shutter without warning, neighborhoods transformed overnight, ecosystems collapsing out of sight. The world itself feels like it is ghosting us, withdrawing one news cycle at a time into abstraction. The more we exist, the more unreal reality seems.

I would add two more iterations to Pettman’s catalogue. First is the phenomenological ghosting of presence without feeling. We find this in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, in which ghosting refers to the process of shutting down one’s emotions. This quality is a precious commodity in the film’s military-industrial complex, weaponized to render one invisible to alien predators who target their prey by detecting fear pheromones. To ghost, here, is to master disappearance from within. Second is Deanimated, an experimental film by avant-gardist Martin Arnold, who digitally erases actors one by one from the 1941 Bela Lugosi picture Invisible Ghost, until all that remains are empty rooms, doors that open by themselves, and dramatic music without diegesis. The world goes on performing, emptied of its inhabitants. The viewer, too, becomes ghosted, watching absence itself take center stage.

The loss of the one who ghosts us, Pettman ultimately suggests, is not merely a social wound but an ontological one. We lose not only another person but the mirror in which our own being once took shape. The terror of ghosting lies not in being forgotten but in discovering how easily we can forget ourselves when deprived of the other’s gaze. Technology did not create this fragility but has only revealed that relationships have always been provisional, sustained by faith, fantasy, and the flickering persistence of attention.

To be ghosted, then, is to confront the truth that love, friendship, and community are nothing more than brief illuminations against the endless dark of unbeing.

David Rothenberg: Secret Sounds of Ponds (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

“The pond is the teacher, underwater lies the source.”
–David Rothenberg

Near the apartment complex I once called home, before I migrated to my present dwelling, a pond would awaken each night in amphibious utterances. Frogs, crickets, and invisible choir members released a polyphony of chirrups and croaks that spilled into the humid dark. It was alluring enough that I found myself inventing post-meridian errands just to step outside and listen. I remember how the air trembled with that sound, neither wild nor domestic, a liminal language that both invited and eluded comprehension. I never tried to categorize it then; it was enough to be absorbed. What struck me most was its irregularity, a music without time signatures, and yet, the longer I listened, the more I could discern the soloists from within, the deliberate from the accidental. What I did not realize, however, was that this was only the surface of a deeper, secret orchestra playing just beneath my feet.

It was during the stillness of the pandemic that musician, philosopher, educator, and animal collaborator David Rothenberg turned his own attention downward. He found that ponds, those apparently placid mirrors of sky and branch, are paradoxical entities: tranquil to the eye, yet pulsing with invisible sound. Above the water, a hush. Below, a thicket of sonic life. But how does one hear through liquid? Rothenberg, already attuned to the songs of whales, found his usual instruments inadequate. He commissioned a hydrophone capable not merely of recording but of touching sound, translating the tactile shimmer of aquatic vibration into something audible. In doing so, he discovered not merely a pond but a pulse, a murmuring node within the living organism of the planet. In this submerged language, he recognized that the world itself is always breathing, whispering, and improvising at the edge of consciousness. The recordings discussed and contextualized in Secret Sounds of Ponds feel like a revelation, a form of listening that brushes the hair of the mind, a continuous and organic ASMR channel that one can tune into and out of at will.

Yet the music is not only animal. The flora, too, contribute their delicate speech: plants releasing oxygen bubbles as miniature offerings, each a syllable in an ancient conversation. “The plants keep time,” Rothenberg notes, “and the beasts carry a tune.” One hears this and realizes how naïve our auditory hierarchies have been. We’ve long believed that sound belongs to the realm of motion, of bodies and breath. Yet here are rooted beings, singing through photosynthesis, metronomes of life itself.

Rothenberg reminds us that “even in this century where everything seems possible, morphable, changeable, hearable, findable at a moment’s thought, there are still sounds around us… immediate sounds that we still don’t know.” If we are ignorant of our surroundings, perhaps we are equally ignorant of our origins. We imagine that knowing where we are going requires understanding where we’ve come from, yet Rothenberg suggests the opposite: that both the departure and destination are wrapped in the same sonic fog. Thus, we meet the limits of our perception and the possibility that such limits are spiritual. The indistinguishable becomes indistinguishably beautiful. Insect, fish, turtle, plant: all’s fair in love and pond life.

This mode of listening is not a science but a humility. It compels us to ask impossible questions. If technology must translate these frequencies for us, were we ever meant to hear them? When we call this music, do we consecrate or colonize it? Is it communion or interference? Somewhere, I imagine, John Cage laughs from the beyond, his silence perforated by the croak of a frog.

“For all the millions of hours we have spent together with animals,” Rothenberg observes, “we still cannot speak with them.” The task, then, is not to translate but to collaborate, to become co-musicians in a score that predates our language. Sound may have no intention, no recipient, and yet we crave both. We are instruments yearning for meaning, resonating for a moment before fading into the dissonance of time. Listening, as Rothenberg reminds us, “reveals things alive before we can claim them.” This is the ethical heart of the project: listening not to possess but to participate. Without that transformation, we remain voyeurs; with it, we become apprentices in the grammar of existence, learning not to compose but to decompose, to take apart what our words have wrongly fused.

I think here of Bashō’s immortal haiku, in D.T. Suzuki’s translation:

Into the ancient pond
A frog jumps
Water’s sound!

It is easy to romanticize this image, to see it as a vignette of simplicity. Yet the poem’s true profundity lies in its inversion: the pond, not the frog, is the voice; the frog merely the activator, the finger on the cosmic key. That the frog is jumping into a pond is never in doubt, yet translators have long struggled to articulate that final sound—“splash,” “plop,” “water-note,” “kerplunk”—but perhaps that indeterminacy is the point. The sound eludes capture because it was never meant to be caught. Like Rothenberg’s recordings, made accessible via QR codes throughout the book or online in album form as Secret Songs of Ponds, it dwells in the space between articulation and silence, between perception and being.

Hence the human impulse to name: to label every ripple and rustle—scratching, blipping, bubbling, warbling—as if taxonomy were intimacy. Rothenberg resists that impulse by layering his own clarinet into the watery mix, joining a chorus rather than leading it. His collaborations with Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu, whose deconstructive poetry conjures an invented language of resonance rather than reference, push this further. Her contributions hover like dreams, vocal fragments rising from the mire of the unconscious. Listening to “I Still Don’t Get How Distance Works,” one feels time dissolving; her voice becomes an echo of the pond itself, diffused and omnipresent.

In other tracks, Rothenberg’s clarinet drifts like an inquisitive creature among the bubbles and squeaks—curious, reverent, never dominant. I am reminded of Ornette Coleman’s philosophy of sound as motion through possibility: music as exploration, not arrival. Elsewhere, the pond alone is permitted to speak, recalling early electronic composers like Ilhan Mimaroglu, who inverted futurism into introspection, aiming their microphones inward to locate the primordial hum within us all.

Most of all, I think of Akifumi Nakajima, a.k.a. Aube, whose sonic investigations of fire, air, blood, and brain waves sought the inner pulse of matter itself. To engage with Secret Sounds of Ponds is to place a stethoscope against the earth’s waterlogged chest and hear it crackle. Rothenberg confesses, “I don’t play with the pond, but the pond plays with me.” That inversion, again, is key. The artist becomes the instrument, the listener the medium. This is not music about nature; it is nature using us to make itself known.

There is a sacred vertigo in such encounters. What begins as fascination turns toward reverence, even dread, as one senses the immensity of what vibrates beneath the apparent stillness of the world. Ponds, like temples, are mirrors of our incomprehension. They draw us inward until we see that to listen is to surrender.

And so, whenever I pass a pond now, I find myself wondering not merely what lives there, but where it came from. Science offers its explanations of erosion, accumulation, and equilibrium, but the heart refuses to hear them. The mind insists on something older, more mysterious: that the earth itself opened a small mouth to breathe, and we, by accident or grace, happened to hear it.

Rebuilding the Fourth Wall: Toward an Ontology of Vision in Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations

| Tyran Grillo

To think of vision as truth is to confuse perception with revelation. Every image born of pigment, photon, and pixel is already a technological interpretation (the #unfiltered hashtag is a lie). Artificial intelligence magnifies the primordial compulsion to externalize thought into form, mirroring our metaphysical anxieties in the intricacies of ocular logic. Yet when AI begins to dream, no longer are we the authors of representation but the represented. Instead of marveling at the shadows in Plato’s proverbial cave, we become the shadows themselves. Artist Trevor Paglen has turned this reversal into both method and critique, exposing a precarious ontology of vision.

In practical terms, AI is fundamentally trained to recognize faces, objects, and places with mundane equivalents. Paglen, however, decided to do something different by feeding AI “irrational” subjects like philosophy, history, and literature. Using a generative adversarial network (GAN), an AI model that creates images based on what it has analyzed and absorbed from existing datasets or “corpuses,” he wondered what might happen when AI hallucinates an image. As Paglen explains, the process involves two networks engaged in a kind of aesthetic duel: a “Generator,” which draws pictures, and a “Discriminator,” which evaluates them. The two AIs play a game of deception and refinement, cycling through thousands or even millions of iterations until the Generator produces images capable of fooling the Discriminator. The results of this strange symbiosis are entirely synthetic images with no real-world referent, yet both AIs believe them to be genuine.

Here, Paglen discusses the project in more detail:

The fruit of these efforts is Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, an ongoing series begun in 2017 and documented in this book of the same name. Published by Sternberg Press as Volume 4 of the Research/Practice series, it features a conversation between Paglen and editor Anthony Downey, preceded by Downey’s essay, “The Return of the Uncanny: Artificial Intelligence and Estranged Futures.” Downey reminds us that because AI lacks embodied experience, it produces only “disquieting allegories of our world” at best. Its outputs expose the opaque workings of machine cognition, parallel to the brain’s own trial-and-error rehearsals toward getting something “right.” Here, the fourth wall is not merely broken but rebuilt in its own image. Downey asks whether AI is training us to see the world machinically, and whether we already do. Thus, Paglen’s series explores how machine learning “functions as a computational means to produce knowledge” and, in doing so, outs AI as a heuristic device, “capable, that is, of making sense of, if not predefining, how we perceive the world.”

Paglen draws on taxonomies of knowing akin to metaphorical or substitutive instruments of perception. His parameters constitute a cyclical echo chamber that nonetheless manages to step outside the bounds of acceptability while keeping one foot within them. He calls this “machine realism” because the images are recursive of the engine’s own hallucinations. As Downey observes, “the process is never totally predictable, nor is it reliable.” Then again, is reality itself reliable? Do we not also seek to document, catalog, and amplify that which defies predictability?

Because a GAN’s goal is to generate images that appear categorically relevant while simultaneously deceiving the system, its hallucinations blur distinctions between data and invention. Downey warns that such images, if treated as predictive, can easily become more real than real. For even though they do not exist, these errors and phantasms are not anomalies of image-processing models; they are their very foundation.

So, what does an AI hallucination look like? Take A Man (Corpus: The Humans):

At first, we recognize a human figure, yet the longer we gaze, the more the image unravels, raising a disquieting question: Is distorting coherence into chaos any different from coaxing coherence out of chaos? Is there a point at which the two converge?

This tension recalls the left panel of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, where “inaccurate” men accompany flayed carcases:

Despite our aversion to inner flesh, it is the men, those still tenuously tethered to outward form, who disturb us most. When reduced to raw meat, we are more easily abstracted and dismissed; when nearing coherence, we ache for completion.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that Paglen would venture into the supernatural. Angel (Corpus: Spheres of Heaven) borrows from Renaissance art but reassembles its tropes in a landscape unmoored from conventional metrics:

The context is blatantly parasitic, tugging at the figure with distillational aggression. Here, the “angel” is no divine messenger but an ambassador of categorial confusion.

The closer we get to the intimate, the darker the images become. In Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism), the most legible face in the book is also the most “demonic”:

The vampire, parasite of parasites, stands as an agent of eternal torment. A Pale and Puffy Face (Corpus: The Interpretation of Dreams) elicits a similar flicker between attraction and horror that is just human enough to seem alive yet warped enough to feel forged:

Why, one wonders, do these visions feel not only unsettling but somehow sinister?

In anticipation of one possible answer, allow me to return momentarily to Bacon, whose Three Studies of George Dyer are a hallucinatory corpus in their own right:

These falsifications unsettle precisely because they start with a uniquely verifiable identity before marring it beyond recognition. Like a coroner’s report, they document the mutilation of everything we hold stable about the self.

Paglen’s systemic hallucinations similarly engage with another psychological touchpoint in the trauma of seeing and of being seen. Through trauma’s hallucinatory unfolding, bodies and landscapes become intertwined in a web of atrocity, where loss and recovery mirror one another. His images dwell in the rupture between memory and forgetting. 

A red thread through all this is the illusion of human control. Something nefarious always seems to pull the strings, an invisible force with its own agenda. Escape is made possible only through an existence maintained at great sacrifice. In this metaphysical tug-of-war, the line between the animating and the animated blurs; embodiment and disembodiment become indistinguishable.

Trauma, in this sense, fantasizes an impossible realization of recall, a form of omniscience forever out of reach. It is “locked away,” awaiting the right (read: wrong) invocation to bring it out in the open. But locked away where? In our will toward self-destruction? And what manifests that will more pervasively (if not perversely) than technology? David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, particularly Part 8, is a cinematic case in point. It reimagines the nuclear detonation of the Trinity Test as the birth of evil, a revisionist study in how atomic tampering channels the uncanny.

Lynch’s Inland Empire breeds like-minded logic when, in a moment of horrifying self-contamination, Laura Dern’s face is assaulted by the overlay of her nemesis, the so-called Phantom:

The film’s tagline, “A Woman in Trouble,” underscores her dissolution: corporeal integrity undone in a space of profound unrest. Similarly, Philippe Grandrieux’s La Vie nouvelle drags its characters through a ravaged Sarajevo, where language disintegrates and bodies seek reconciliation in ruin. The result is rebirth and a scream in which one finds only more broken sutures, anticipated by a terrifying night-vision interlude in which the human visage is excoriated of its sanctity.

Walter Benjamin’s dictum that “film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man” has never been more apt. AI-generated imagery likewise gnaws at the barrier between the natural and the supernatural. Its manifestations of trauma without selfhood render the body a vessel of moral and perceptual violation. Displaced from domesticity, it reflects irresolvable turmoil, and the more autonomy it achieves, the more humanity we scramble to recover. This explains why AI’s creations feel so spectral: we have seen their kind before. The only difference is that, whereas once we regarded them only in the mind’s eye, now they are actualized with excruciating pervasiveness.

The premise that benign technologies might beget horror reveals our lack of control more than it restores harmony. These hybridizations of natural and unnatural law force us to question identity itself, ejecting us from human-centered hierarchies into a dialectic with entropic nature. Even something as simple as Paglen’s Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents) conjures narratives of missiles and imminent annihilation.

We fear not that “evil was born,” as Grace Zabriskie so artfully intones in Inland Empire, but that it never needed to be born. It simply is. It predates us and will outlive us, feeding on forces that nevertheless make us who we are. And so, AI embodies its own eerie vitality, a dead signifier born from the narcissistic desire to reproduce life and deny death’s power. Its synthetic offspring thrive on replication, nursing at the breast of finitude.

Diving once again into Twin Peaks: The Return, we find faces opening into voids inhabited by unclean spirits, golden orbs, and infinite darkness, each a portal instead of a mirror:

In his dialogue with Downey, Paglen explains that the Adverserially Evolved Hallucinations project lets us see inside the “black box” of image-processing models and think from within them rather than be guided by them. This, he suggests, might help us move beyond the temptations of perception. “AI models,” he notes, “actively perform processes of manipulation; they want you to see something.” That desire is itself hallucinatory, as well as dangerous. Just as ChatGPT can invent a nonexistent citation, generative image models can fabricate surveillance realities indistinguishable from fact. The imposition of the fake upon the real becomes so seamless that we cease to question it.

Once something takes the form of an image, it acquires an aura of inevitability. Like a lyric we can’t imagine written differently, the hallucination becomes fixed. These interdimensional images seduce with the promise of infinite variation yet horrify with their fixation on wrongness. In leaning toward the actual through rudimentary shapes and gestures (what Paglen calls “primitives”), we find that the only truth worth protecting is that which resists us. Such is the paradox at the heart of all AI-generated imagery: the more real it appears, the more counterfeit it becomes.

A Stone in the Water: Tracing the Ripple Effects of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

| Tyran Grillo

The highway of the upright is to depart from evil:
he that keepeth his way preserveth his soul.
–Proverbs 16:17

Most novels proceed as a river does—flowing from source to mouth, obedient to the order of time, accumulating its inevitable dams, docks, and diversions along the way. The Idiot, however, is no such river. Dostoevsky drops his protagonist into the current not to drift but to disturb, thus revealing the eddies and whirlpools that form around innocence when it trespasses into the murky waters of high society. That first drop lands Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin—and by extension, the reader—on a train bound for Petersburg. He is fresh from a Swiss sanatorium, where for four years he has been treated for epilepsy. His fellow travelers—Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, newly enriched and drunk on inheritance, and the gossiping Lukyan Timofeevich Lebedev—are the first to be caught in his wake. Rogozhin, with the tactless curiosity of a man ruled by appetite, asks whether the prince is a “fancier of the female sex.” When Myshkin denies it, Rogozhin replies, “[Y]ou come out as a holy fool, Prince, and God loves your kind!” Thus is the first stone cast into the still pond of Myshkin’s effect, its ripples reaching outward in mockery and awe alike.

Soon, the prince finds himself in the home of Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, though it is toward Epanchin’s wife, Elizaveta Prokofyevna, that his lineage tenuously connects him. Within moments, he becomes an object of curiosity, as if his very simplicity were some divine riddle. The Epanchins and their daughters draw near him not from affection but fascination; his every word seems to hang in the air long after it has been spoken. So begins the novel’s great fractal of human encounters, each scene branching into another with the stubborn logic of fate.

Translator Richard Pevear observes that, though The Idiot is unanchored to place, it is never abstract. Every room, every parlor and garden, serves as a shell into which the living organism of the narrative crawls. The spaces are cramped, yet within them Dostoevsky builds an architecture of the soul. Each wall is a moral boundary, each window a glimpse into depravity.

The most cavernous of these shells is Lizaveta Prokofyevna herself—“a hotheaded and passionate lady,” who, “without thinking long, would sometimes raise all anchors and set out for the open sea without checking the weather.” In her temperament, we glimpse the embryonic forms of her three daughters: the sensible Alexandra, the artistic Adelaida, and the beautiful, capricious Aglaya. Orbiting them are other satellites of this anxious universe: Rogozhin, the merchant whose newfound wealth becomes license for cruelty; Lebedev, the self-proclaimed “professor of the Antichrist,” who reads the signs of apocalypse in the iron veins of Europe’s railroads; and, most haunting of all, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, the fallen specter, whose trauma becomes the crucible of the entire tale. She is distance made flesh: adored by men, despised by women, yet pitied by both.

At the trembling center of this constellation burns Myshkin himself—a sun both fragile and inexhaustible. His presence exposes others as a mirror does, revealing the distortions they cannot bear to face. “I really came only so as to get to know people,” he says to the Epanchins, a confession so plain it becomes profound. In that aim to understand the human heart lies the novel’s central pulse.

From his first conversation, Myshkin unveils the spiritual burden of consciousness. He speaks of men awaiting execution, drawing on Dostoevsky’s own brush with the firing squad: “Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle, and shoot at him, and he’ll still keep hoping; but read that same soldier a sentence for certain, and he’ll lose his mind or start weeping.” The words tremble with prophetic weight, foreshadowing the undoing of characters condemned not by law but by their own desires.

Lizaveta and her daughters listen as if to a visitation. Myshkin, recalling his lonely youth, declares, “Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they’re little and it’s too early for them to know. What a sad and unfortunate idea!” Yet the world he enters treats him precisely as such a child: harmless, ignorant, to be humored and dismissed. “The risen sun,” the narrator tells us, “softened and brightened everything for a moment,” and so it is with Myshkin: his light briefly transforms, though it cannot redeem.

When he first beholds Nastasya’s portrait, he perceives in her a soul both contemptuous and simple-hearted, “filled with suffering.” Her name, from anastasis (resurrection), bespeaks her torment: the lamb whose innocence was traded for the amusement of nonbelievers. Like him, she is called “crazy,” though her madness is but the logical end of a world that mistakes cruelty for sophistication.

Even Myshkin’s name bears contradiction: from mysh, meaning “mouse,” and Lev, or lion. In Dostoevsky’s notebooks, beside sketches of the novel, appear two words umbilically connected: “Prince-Christ.” And yet, Myshkin does not forgive sin; he merely reveals it by existing. To Nastasya, he says, “I am nothing, but you have suffered and have emerged pure from such a hell, and that is a lot.” Thus, he grants her what theology cannot: recognition.

His influence spreads like contagion. “I believe God brought you to Petersburg from Switzerland precisely for me,” exclaims Lizaveta, and though she speaks in self-interest, she unknowingly sheds veracity. Myshkin is brought not for one but for all. When he visits Rogozhin’s home, he beholds a copy of Hans Holbein the Younger’s Christ in the Tomb, that merciless painting of the dead Savior, devoid of light or transcendence. “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” says the prince. Rogozhin, missing the irony, takes him at his word. Myshkin explains: “[H]owever many books I’ve read on the subject, it has always seemed to me that they were talking or writing books that were not at all about that.” He concludes that “the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning… there’s something else here… that atheisms will eternally glance off.” Dostoevsky thus holds up the Russian heart, trembling with contradictions, as both the disease and the cure: a heart that forgets the Father even as it cries out for Him.

If The Idiot has often been called satire, it is only because its realism is too acute to endure. It captures the narcissism of the upper classes with the precision of a surgeon and the patience of a saint. Myshkin’s self-awareness is his shield: “What sort of idiot am I now, when I myself understand that I’m considered an idiot?” he asks, deflating mockery by acknowledging it. Like Eminem’s self-flagellation in 8 Mile—if one may indulge a modern echo—he disarms his accusers through confession, transforming insult into revelation. What they cannot abide is not his foolishness but his love.

This love, however, is tested to absurdity. When an impostor by the name of Antip Burdovsky demands a share of the prince’s inheritance under false pretenses, Myshkin offers it anyway. Though exposed as a fraud, Burdovsky still receives the prince’s charity, for in Myshkin’s eyes, deceit and misfortune are twins. Such naivety is his virtue, his madness, and his crown of thorns.

In a later gathering, one Evgeny Pavlych recounts a murder trial in which the lawyer excuses the killer’s actions as “natural” under poverty. This comment provokes nods and murmurs of agreement among those assembled, to which Lizaveta responds by accusing them of being vainglorious madmen who have turned their back on God and Christ. She lambastes them for harping on the “woman question,” which haunts the novel with its articulation of women’s desires vis-à-vis the men in their lives: “You acknowledge that society is savage and inhuman because it disgraces a seduced girl… But if she’s been hurt, why, then, do you yourselves bring her out in front of that same society and demand that it not hurt her!” It is a sermon worthy of record, and yet it vanishes in the noise of polite indifference.

Among the assembled is Ippolit Terentyev, a dying youth whose intellect burns as his body fails. His “Necessary Explanation,” a swan song in letter form that he insists on reading aloud, is both confession and defiance. “People are created to torment each other,” he proclaims. Confronting the same Holbein painting, he asks, “[H]ow could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect?” and later, “Can something that has no image come as an image?” For Ippolit, faith is cruelty postponed. “Let consciousness be lit up by the will of a higher power,” he muses, “and let that power suddenly decree its annihilation… let it be so.” His despair is a dark parody of Myshkin’s compassion: both see too clearly to live comfortably among men.

Myshkin, whose “head worked quite distinctly, though his soul was sick,” stands apart. Love is denied him not by fate but by incompatibility with a world that feeds on contradiction. His tenderness for Aglaya withers into disillusion; his pity for Nastasya curdles into dread. Like a puzzle piece that almost fits, he must be left aside until the picture itself changes.

And what of the others? They collapse one by one under the weight of their vanity, leaving the prince almost alone, a gold-foiled icon among ruins.

In one of the novel’s most terrifying moments, Dostoevsky describes Myshkin’s seizure: “A dreadful, unimaginable scream, unlike anything, bursts from the breast… it may even seem as if someone else were screaming from inside the man.” The cry is metaphysical; it is the scream of all creation recognizing itself. To read The Idiot is to experience that seizure, to awaken, trembling, in the aftermath of one’s own delusions. Its absurdity, like its truth, is more real than reality itself. Dostoevsky does not offer resolution; he offers revelation. And when we close the book, the echo of that scream remains: terrible, holy, and alive.

Getting Some Air: Gasping Through Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

| Tyran Grillo

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
–Matthew 6:6

Rodion Romanovich Raskalnikov is a murderer. To say as much is to betray everything and nothing about Crime and Punishment, the plot of which he is the central protagonist. But what has he—and will he—become? Such is the bigger question Fyodor Dostoevsky examines throughout his 1866 masterpiece.

In its opening act, we see enough of Raskalnikov’s contemplations to know that he is an unsettled individual, one who lives in the shadows because there is so little light to be had. Stepping out from his rented closet one hot July evening, “as if indecisively,” he is already waist-deep in melancholia. His modest lodgings do not constitute a place of rest or meditation. If anything, he has turned the Bible verse quoted above on its head. Rather than pray to the Father, he throws the doors of his heart wide open to the Devil, whose ever-encroaching impulses are given the freedom to sow themselves in his soil and absorb the tainted nutrients of his self-aggrandizement.

It is no surprise that the first words he utters are not to a friend, a person on the street, or to us. Rather, they are to himself. Internal dialogue is his magnetic north, and in following it, he leads us by proxy into a web of characters so electric and alive (even, if not especially, those hurtling toward death) that his fate can only be an object of our curiosity. Before we get to know him, he is already wondering: “Am I really capable of that?” thus alluding, of course, to the murder he has already contemplated and played out in his head and which, almost in the same breath, he dismisses as fantasy. And yet, fantasy is more than the realization of a desire. It is the very force by which he learns to desire. So strong is this drive that he begins to question whether it comes from within or from without. “If not reason, then the devil!” he spits forth, pitting the impulse to kill in a false dichotomy. So, too, does the Devil cloak himself in reason.

Or, more accurately, if not pure reason, then its tainted cousin of casuistry, the process by which the baseless effort to justify immorality becomes a self-fulfilling Ouroboros. This is why we so often find Raskalnikov talking to himself and why passersby take him to be a careless drunk. In his mind, the answers to all moral questions have been primed and ready but must be taken by force to ring true. Ironically, this may just be the most genuine thing about him.

Of the catalytic murder, the victim of which, Alyona Ivanovna, is universally hated for her shady pawnbrokering and abusive nature, we are given a relatively brief and merciless account, so that by the time the deed is done, we are invited to regard it with visceral dismissal. In the subsequent adrenaline rush, he becomes enchanted by its unfolding, as well as by the fact that an unsuspecting second victim had to be involved after walking in on the scene in progress. The translator’s introduction rightly puts it this way: “Crime and Punishment is a highly unusual mystery novel: the most mystified character in it is the murderer himself.”

That said, one would be mistaken in thinking that Raskalnikov’s torment is a result of his heinous crime. He has been in its clutches long before we first encounter him. It did not come pouring in from a tear in the fabric of time the moment he wielded that fatal axe. It is the result of the exhausting back and forth between his heart and soul that has besought him since childhood. Hence, the dream he has early on in the novel, in which he takes the form of a boy regarding a crowd of drunken rabble-rousers in the rural town where he grew up. Fearful of their coarseness, he clings to his father, a figure now absent in his life and perhaps already a model of indifference then. One of the men launches into a verbal tirade that culminates in him beating a horse to death in full view of the assembled onlookers. Young Raskalnikov cannot bear the sight, and neither can his adult self. After the dream, “the mere thought of it made me vomit in realityand plunged me into horror,” even while knowing that the manner in which the horse was dispatched reflects his desire to carry out the same. Furthermore, on the night of the murder, we are told, “never for a single moment during the whole time could he believe in the feasibility of his designs,” as if this were an excuse for their imminent manifestation.

It is significant, too, that the killer in his dream should be named Mikolka, a diminutive of Nikolas that means “victory of the people.” It conveys, in no uncertain terms, that if the destitute are to find a way out of their predicament, it must be done through violence. All of which points to a sociopolitical subtext that becomes more familiar as the narrative progresses. It is the very idealism that has buried its talons in Raskalnikov’s mind to the point of needing to overthrow the established mechanisms of power under which he knows order and, to risk belaboring the word, reason. He wants so much to rank among the “geniuses” who inhabit his waking thoughts, when he is still nothing more than the dreamed-of boy seeking refuge in his father in the face of senseless killing.

Various names, it turns out, are equally emblematic of inner tensions. Raskolnikov, for one, comes from the word raskolnik, meaning “schismatic,” referring to religious separatism while also implying a splitting of self. And then there is the friend from his university days, Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin, whose surname means “to bring to reason.” Indeed, it is Razumikhin who cuts to the quick of our antihero with almost indulgent aplomb as he strives to “make a human being out of you, after all.” It is also he who helps us throw the parameters of his decrepit reunitee’s worldview into relief. According to said worldview, he observes, “crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social order—that alone and nothing more.” So it is that Raskalnikov’s justificational acrobatics trace a roadmap of interpretation for our benefit. As his enthusiastic acquaintance goes on to say, “Nature isn’t taken into account, nature is driven out, nature is not supposed to be.” Which is entirely accurate because Socialism, in its quest to vanquish hierarchy and oppression, fails to recognize that we are always at war with ourselves. In rejecting the notion of a living soul, it reduces the human condition to unalloyed materialism.

Others are quick to interject their own opinions on these nascent ideals. Among them is Porfiry Petrovich, lead investigator of Alyona’s murder, who is duly fascinated by an article that his main suspect once published titled “On Crime.” Porfiry summarizes its thesis as follows:

“The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary.”

To which its author replies:

“I merely suggested that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right…that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to…step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea—sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind—calls for it.”

Here, we are given insight into his intellectual straw grasping. For even as Raskalnikov expresses this sentiment, he must already know that the philosophy of fulfillment is, at best, a phonetically borrowed loan word in the translation of his life. Still, he is insistent on one thing:

“I only believe in my main idea. It consists precisely in people being divided generally, according to the law of nature, into two categories: a lower one, ordinary people, who are, so to speak, material serving solely for the reproduction of their own kind; and people proper—that is, those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment.”

Phrased differently, instead of simply reproducing through what is natural, the extraordinary creates something out of nothing through what is supernatural. Raskalnikov fancies himself, or at least would like to be, one of those “extraordinary” people who reject God yet wish to hold His power.

And so, his search for redemption ends up being a recapitulation of what makes him so flawed in the first place: namely, his humanity. Unable to take Nihilism to its most logical conclusion yet incapable of playing the role of the young radical, either, he is forced to choose between himself and…himself. With nowhere left to run but inward, he cracks his conscience open like an egg, scrambles the contents, and throws them into the gaping mouths of his listeners. Among those caught in his defenestrations is Sonya Semyonova Marmeladov, the daughter of a former official-turned-alcoholic.

During a climactic meeting with Sonya, Raskalnikov asks her to read to him the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, as recorded in chapter 11 of the Gospel of John. In listening to it, he is met by his greatest adversary: God himself. He may not believe in the Bible, but the weight of it is too much for his feeble shoulders. Even in a mind pierced by existential ennui, he has to admit that some things are best left untouched. Either way, the “second chance” offered in Lazarus’s resurrection is undeniably alluring to the bedraggled idealist, who leverages this intimate connection with Sonya as an opportunity to impatiently unlock too many doors in the advent calendar of his heart far ahead of Christmas, so to speak. When he tells her that “it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” he is at once revealing his weakness and the fact that his remorse has nothing to do with the crime itself but with its aftermath. But no such act can occur in a vacuum, and this realization pains him to no end. In his attempts to blame the demonic for choices that were ultimately his own, he is no different than the “ordinary” people of his disdain.

At the same time, he is assaulted by an all-consuming apathy, which is, beyond the carnival laughter that is the novel’s leitmotif, the key signature of his life. As our narrator would have it: “Evil is the final ambiguity. Reason cannot accept it; rationalizing ideologies denies its existence.” In light of this, we can see that indifference is the greatest horror, as typified by the following narratorial observation: “His heart was empty and blank. He did not want to reflect. Even his anguish had gone; and not a trace remained of his former energy, when he had left the house determined to ‘end it all!’ Total apathy had taken its place.”

In reading this, I was reminded of what English preacher Charles Spurgeon, who was sermonizing at the same time Dostoevsky was penning his novel, and for whom indifference or lethargy was one of the most wicked influences on the convicted soul and something to be struggled against:

“I would far rather have a man an earnest, intense opposer of the gospel than have him careless and indifferent. You cannot do much with a man if he will not speak about religion, or will not come to hear what you have to say concerning the things of God. You might as well have him a downright infidel, like a very leviathan covered with scales of blasphemy, as have him a mere earth-worm wriggling away out of reach.”

We might easily lay this polemical transparency over Raskalnikov’s life, which marks time by the rhythms of a dank and battered city, itself a force of influence on almost every page.Appropriately enough, it takes the utterly deplorable Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, former employer of Raskalnikov’s sister and an unrepentant sensualist, to give us an accurate characterization of the same when he soliloquizes: “One seldom finds a place where there are so many gloomy, sharp, and strange influences on the soul of man as in Petersburg.”

Not one to be proselytized to, Raskalnikov is quick to call out Svidrigailov for enigmatizing an environment that feeds so readily into his lecherous lifestyle. To this, Svidrigailov replies:

“In this debauchery there’s at least something permanent, even based on nature, and not subject to fantasy, something that abides in the blood like a perpetually burning coal, eternally inflaming, which for a long time, even with age, one may not be able to extinguish so easily. Wouldn’t you agree that it’s an occupation of sorts?”

From the perspective of one who has no real occupation (when asked at one point what he does for work, he responds, “I think”), Raskalnikov knows there is nothing to be had in this dialogue. Svidrigailov’s solution to their intellectual quagmire is to proclaim that “what every man of us needs is air, air, air, sir.” However, this is a false proposition, for where can one find air in a place that suffocates by default?

As the most obvious foil for Raskalnikov, Svidrigailov exaggerates some of his traits while subverting others in aggregate. He makes no excuses for himself and, if anything, seems to rather enjoy his position of authority insofar as he, too, is able to deprive others of breath without apparent consequence. At one point in their exchange, he also offers the clearest characterization of Raskalnikov himself:

“You walk out of the house with your head still high. After twenty steps you lower it and put your hands behind your back. You look but apparently no longer see anything either in front of you or to the sides. Finally you begin moving your lips and talking to yourself, sometimes freeing one hand and declaiming, and finally you stop in the middle of the street for a long time.”

In addition to painting him in stark likeness, and because he renders what was once a private detail into a barbed fact, he exposes the hypocrisy of Nihilism, which is supposed to be a net positive by treating everything (and everyone) as expendable, liberating the self from the shackles of accountability. And yet, Raskalnikov is constantly seeking judgment, inviting it from near and far, all the while shocked at his own insolence for letting certain incriminating details slip. The effect is such that he constantly attributes meetings to chance and miracle (“it was as if someone had come to his service”) when it’s clear he had a conscious hand in their denouement. Even when he tries to rationalize his violence through some sort of Robin Hood complex (“For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption”), he goes against the grain of his faith by upholding a moral good.

What distinguishes Nihilism from the Postmodernism of today is that, where the former avows that everything is equally meaningless, the latter claims that everything is equally meaningful. Common to both extremes, however, is the broken promise that either can be a viable escape from the suffering of living in a world bound by sin. What he fears the most is being thought of as innocent, which is why he is so perplexed by how he attracts sympathy and affection without even trying. “But why do they love me so, when I’m unworthy of it!” he cries toward the novel’s conclusion. “Oh, how I hate them all!” If anything, however, his hatred is not of people but of the mercy they carry like a cross, for it is the middle ground he cannot bear to inhabit. By the same token, mercy is the only possibility for redemption and shows that he was never cut out to be a dutiful anarchist. As Dostoevsky so eloquently phrases it: “He would have given anything in the world to be left alone, yet he felt himself that he could not have remained alone for a minute.”

As Raskalnikov gets closer to the possibility of a turnaround, he cannot entertain his lack of resolve as anything other than a failure of principle. Unlike the men of influence he admires from afar, whose exploits were never punished and who “endured their steps” with profound and domineering indifference, he grants himself no right to take that step, and this he regards as his greatest crime: not that he took a human life but that he failed to endure his own steps, deferring instead to confession.

If the only chance at escape is to hit rock bottom, if appreciating life is built on denying its inherent value, then he must be willing to undergo the ideological detox that primes him for love’s fresh coat of paint. Because no matter how much he may deny it, we were never designed to live alone.

*The images in this review were created using artificial intelligence (specifically, ChatGPT). The words they accompany were created using actual intelligence (specifically, my own).

Windfall Light: The Visual Language of ECM

| Tyran Grillo
Windfall Light

“You wish to see, listen; hearing is a step towards vision.”
–Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090-1153)

The act of looking has long been likened to that of listening. Visual art, by no mere coincidence, is often spoken of in compositional terms, as great paintings and sculptures may be likened to symphonies in complexity and coordination. In music itself, sight reading is the quintessential form of looking as listening: The studied mind can track attention across a score and hear the music without a single musician present. But what of listening as an act of looking? Such has been the ethos of ECM Records since its inception.

Although the label has come to have a certain “look” to its admirers, it achieves in its aesthetic presentation not a look but a sound. One listens to an ECM album cover—be it a somber black-and-white photograph, an abstract painting, or a typographic assembly—by hearing it through the eyes. Although the images themselves are not necessarily reflective of the music, and only occasionally of those performing it, they do provide a framework for the disc sheathed within. As was already demonstrated in this book’s predecessor, Sleeves of Desire: A Cover Story, an ECM album is a liminal reality in which the self before and the self after find cohesion at the intersection of life and art.

In the case of ECM, it’s not the cover that necessarily provides insight into the music but, if anything, the music that provides insight into the cover. One example that comes immediately to mind is the montage that graces Pat Metheny’s New Chautauqua:

What could Dieter Rehm’s photo of the Autobahn between Zurich and Munich have to do with such a distinctly American sound? Perhaps nothing when viewed from that POV. But flip the telescope around, turning it into a microscope, and the open road now becomes a universal call to nomadism and to the magnitude of the unknown, of which Metheny’s music is a maverick flagbearer. And herein lies the attraction of the ECM-album-as-object: It invites us to step outside our skins as a way of more fully inhabiting them.

“In terms of the gaze,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “the subject is referred back to itself as object. In terms of listening, it is to itself that the subject refers or refers back.” It may feel natural to separate these two acts. Still, the full package of an ECM album turns closed circuits into open ones, reconnecting us with something childlike, primal if you will, by allowing us to feel that tingle of excitement every time we press PLAY and, after five seconds of anticipation, are thrown into some of the most beautiful dislocations imaginable in recorded music. As La Monte Young once put it to Tony Conrad: “Isn’t it wonderful if someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?” Indeed, we can be sure of reuniting with that same wonder when experiencing the unusual harmony that can only be found between such a counterpoint of sound and image. For how can one behold Jim Bengston’s stark monochromatic landforms on Lachrymae and not want to traverse them with Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusik as guide?

Not only is there a relationship to be found between covers and the albums they grace, but there is also much to discover in new juxtapositions. Because the images in Windfall Light are presented somewhat thematically, whether by photographer or visual motif, we are invited to explore associations we might not otherwise have made. One noteworthy spread, for example, pairs Robert Schumann: In Concert with Angel Song, thereby stimulating our curiosity for the unseen electricity between them.

Furthermore, the book contains five richly varied essays to immerse ourselves in.

In “When Twilight Comes,” German journalist Thomas Steinfeld dutifully expresses the viability of ECM’s visual identity as necessarily open-ended: “None of these pictures is an illustration in the narrow sense of the word. None of them refers to either the music or the musicians as a decoration. None of them pretends to give an interpretation or even to be interpreted on its own.” They are, rather, accompaniments. “Each is a hieroglyph,” he goes on to say, “free from much of its potential meaning, a work of dreamlike qualities, taken from nothing, a sudden objection against the profane and its often inescapable presence.” Steinfeld also notes the prevalence of water in ECM album covers—not as a reflective but a dynamic force—in addition to abstracts, street scenes, and less definable paeans to silence. Regarding the rare portraits of the actual featured musicians (Paul Motian, Meredith Monk, Keith Jarrett, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Charles Lloyd, etc.), he wonders: “Is this an accident, an honor, a matter of circumstance, or devotion?”

Author and museum curator Katharina Epprecht goes a step further in evoking the term “Transmedia Images.” By the title of her contribution, she means to suggest that ECM’s covers possess an interdisciplinary adjacency. Rather than being tautological loops, they are part of a “vast puzzle,” each a doorway into other senses and materialities. Thus, it is not the image’s ability to illustrate the music but rather “the immensely refined way that it handles unexpected shifts of meaning” that any listener will inevitably encounter. And while the images may be “based on correspondence to the character and quality of the music,” they are not beholden to it. Hence their potential as catalysts for personal transformation. “[T]he carefully packaged silver discs,” she waxes most literally, “are light and portable companions through life, motivating us to engage in contemplation, to pause for a moment.” In that respect, they allow us to understand more about our place in the world by questioning the many borders we draw around, through, over, and under it. Epprecht even provides a quintessential example of her own in Re: Pasolini:

Of this cover, she observes the following: “All of the gracious Virgin Mary’s senses are concentrated on her child, while the ears of the donkey unconsciously and reflexively register every sound. The instinctive perception of animals is unbiased and undeviating. I can think of no other picture that more touchingly elevates maternal attentiveness and unadulterated hearing to a metaphor.” Therefore, it’s as much the choice of image as its content that inspires us to regard the old as new, and vice versa.

British writer Geoff Andrew takes us yet another step deeper into intersectionality in “Leur musique: Eicher/Godard – Sound/Image.” Here, the concern is with the cinematic awareness that has long been at the heart of producer Manfred Eicher’s approach to mise-en-scène. Because both he and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard are fond of “juxtaposing, combining and mixing up elements which most people in their respective fields would never dream of bringing together,” it was only natural that Godard’s work would come to be associated with such seminal recordings as Suspended Night, which features a still from his mangum opus, Histoire(s) du Cinema, and Soul of Things, which references Éloge de l’amour:

Where the latter film also gives us Norma Winstone’s Distances, we have the former to thank also for Words of the Angel, Morimur, Requiem for Larissa, Songs of Debussy and Mozart, and Voci.

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Perhaps not surprisingly, these are already borrowings from other sources—quotations of quotations (and is not classical music the same?). Other Godard touchpoints include Notre musique for Asturiana and Passion for Cello and Trivium.

And let us not forget the soundtracks of Godard’s own Nouvelle Vague and the above-mentioned Histoire(s) du Cinema.

One could hardly imagine such a book as Windfall Light without including the perspective of at least one ECM musician, and in pianist and composer Ketil Bjørnstad, we are given a most suitable ambassador. In “Landscapes and Soundscapes,” he looks not at the spatial but at the temporal. In speaking of the timeless quality of the covers, he notes a preference for monochrome and Nordic landscapes and atmospheres. “Being produced by Manfred Eicher is a purification process for a musician,” he reveals. In so doing, he leaves an implied question hanging in the air: Does a cover photograph or painting also undergo a sort of purification process? When disassociated from its original context, does not the image open itself to infinite possibilities? Bjørnstad again: “Just as great composers and painters are recognizable down to the smallest phrase or brushstroke, ECM’s music and visual world are recognizable without the slightest danger of anyone calling this stagnation.” Thus, the more this recognition settles in our gray matter, the more we come to equate the landscape with the soundscape.

Last but certainly not least is “Polyphonic Pictures” by Lars Müller, whose publishing imprint has given us this fine volume. His offering is a relatively zoomed-out perspective on the questions at hand. Going so far as to describe the covers and music of ECM as “libertarian”—at least in the sense that they elide the intervention of power structures that all too often infect recorded media—he characterizes them as “afterimages of memorized circumstances far more than they are depictions of things that have been seen.” In that sense, they grow with listeners in connection to lived experience. This take resonates with me at the deepest personal level, as even one glimpse of a beloved album cover invokes a reel of memories, associations, and impressions. Rather than their technical aspects, it is their eventfulness, their movement in stillness, and their visceral foundations that make them come alive. And so, in his ordering and layout of the images, he has created for us a self-avowed “visual score.” Ultimately, they are only as delible as the paper they’re printed on, and so they can only live on in the mind’s eye, which, if it’s not obvious by now, is more accurately depicted as an ear.