Epigraphs

Ketil Bjørnstad piano
David Darling cello
Recorded September 1998
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Driven into the
terrain
with the unmistakable track:
grass, written asunder.
–Paul Celan, “The Straitening”

Until Epigraphs, the output from Norwegian pianist Ketil Bjørnstad and American cellist David Darling had been explicitly aquatic, as on The River the duo furthered ideas and atmospheres explored on the quartet project The Sea. Here there is a more grounded sense of architecture. And while some of it remains activated by water, for the most part it observes as it feels: on high ground. It is not a boat but an observatory, which allows the eyes to look freely into the heavens where feet and oars may not progress.

The resonance of the recording takes lantern shape. The “Epigraph” theme is its flame. As such, it flickers without ever losing hold of wick, a moment of dance lost as quickly as it fades. Much of this light comes through in song titles alone. There is enough dawn in “Wakening,” for one, to deny the imminence of dusk, so that the draw of “Silent Dream” moves with almost painful self-awareness. “The Lake” looks back through overtly drenched eyes toward a moving rite of passage. “Gothic,” too, sounds like a seed for The Sea that never sprouted, content in being self-contained. One can almost hear those distant cries, swooning electric between the clouds. In the spirit of balance, Darling digs low in “Upland,” reassuring us that Earth is not forgotten. He slips into the topography of Bjørnstad’s playing like a shoe to a foot, which follows wherever the wind may lead. Only at the end does he leap skyward through the narrow eye of a shooting star.

A smattering of Renaissance material by William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Guillaume Dufay, and Gregor Aichinger rounds out the disc and reveals itself as the core of everything that Bjørnstad and Darling have molded together. Byrd’s “Pavane” is replete with such gentility in the artists’ touch that one can almost taste the mythological impulses that nourish them. Aichinger’s “Factus Est Repente” ends with stark hymnal energy. Like the fountain pen that flows as long as there is ink, it fades only when the blood has left its poetry.

Epigraphs further yields two important tracks for both musicians and label. First is “After Celan,” which combines the shape of words and the shape of music. Second is “Song for TKJD,” a profound dip into Darling’s whirlpool of multi-tracked pathos. Here the landscape stretches, pixilates into a mosaic of monochrome. Like a lost traveler from his Cello, it comes to us fully bearded with the eternal youth of its message. It is a wavering tapestry in which Bjørnstad somehow finds purchase in the bones, a ladder of pages in absence of binding.

The quiet power of this music is its emphasis of reality over thought. It rounds the edges of our quotidian activities with intermittent variations, leitmotifs, and signposts. Bjørnstad and Darling share an ability to take something melancholy, even morose, and flood it with light to expose a spectrum in darkest hours. From the past to the present and back again, their path ties a loophole in space and cinches it until the moon closes her monocle.

The River

Ketil Bjørnstad piano
David Darling cello
Recorded June 1996 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

If ever there was a seed beating like a shaded heart in The Sea, it was the twined musical filaments of Ketil Bjørnstad and David Darling. The Norwegian pianist and American cellist spoke on that session like siblings, at points giving us a foretaste of the droning flavors we encounter at the edge of The River. The size and scope of the water have changed in name only, for here is the former’s other half, spreading its finger paint across twelve parallel sections. If we note anything different this time around, it’s that the horizon feels so close that we could just close our eyes and reach out and there would be the sun.

Bjørnstad’s love of aquatic themes stretches an ideal surface tension across which Darling may unfurl his sails. The delicate ostinato of one becomes the leviathan drone of the other, drawing threads through opaque expanse (just as Swiss-born artist Mayo Bucher has placed a white edge through this and select other ECM cover paintings). As cello keens and trembles through a pianistic hall of mirrors, it ladles shadow from the wells of solitude in which we all take shape before birth and to which we also return, lowered in buckets of light. So is The River as much about earth as it is about water, impossible to separate from the glitter of mineral deposits that marks its flow. Darling may paint the air as a salmon through the current, but he is also keenly aware of the sediment kicked up by his journey, of the molecular oneness that binds. Lost to the gazes of two figures crouched at the banks, lowering offering memories to an open fan of moonlight, he swims on.

These are pieces of subtle virtuosity, timbre, and emotional integrity, utterly devoid of self-interest. Their flowering symmetry is a living palindrome of surrender that shuns the pleasures of its philosophies in favor of feeling for its own sake. Though overwhelming at times, there is never a possibility of drowning when water is your air. In this reverie there can be no reveries, for the world is already a dream.

Alternate cover

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