transparent abelard: The Falls of Hyperion

The Falls of Hyperion Karolina Ossowska Jeff Gburek
recorded between September 2016--2017
     Field recordings heard on the album were captured in Romania,
Italy, Poland & Ireland. Instruments: Violins, Steel-String Guitar,
Prepared Guitar, Microcassette, Thai Gongs, Hand-drum, Piano,
Inside Piano, Piezo Elements
(all reverb effects created by home-made plate echo),
Yamaha Keyboard, Goa Bells, Aluminum Gamelan, Voices, Snare,
Kocioł (Traditional Wielkopolska Tympani).
Texts: Lift Not The Painted Veil by P.B. Shelley
   & The Rushes by Jeff Gburek
Photographs & Cover Composition: Karolina Ossowska

listen here:    https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-falls-of-hyperion

photo and composition by Karolina Ossowska

With a palpable sense of relief I pressed the "publish" button a few seconds, few days ago on the album (or sequence of compositions) I started thinking about in 2015 and despite what it says on the page, it began with a few violin passages I had asked Karolina to play in November 2015. The mood passed and the feeling would not return until the next autumn of 2016 when the 2 main tracks took the shape they retain here. The material spans our recent relocation to the other side of town and perhaps seals and allows us to release the quasi-rural life of Wilda (tongue firmly in cheek) and by the time October came round I had the final piece, Lift Not The Painted Veil, arranged, mapped and then executed all but for the poem that finally rained down with Orionid meteorite shower on October 21, which was rendered as voice-over on October 30th, 2017, in one sitting. There remains only to assemble the physical copies for the limited edition. Place your orders soon for those because both I and Karolina will be on the road over the Christmas/New Year's period. Sit back and listen, it's a long journey. Dreams and visions are the aim so fear not the veil. Be lifted.

listen here: https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-falls-of-hyperion

In the core of the matter, the dark matter, in the hidden forces of nature which nature has yet to discover, as if in the first and last frontier of a mind that seeks to know, that seeks either science (demonstrable) or gnosis (intuitive): our theme. The first Hyperion is the one we know, by name, but even so, distantly, the Titan, the light-bearer, the high-one, star before the stars, the father of Helios and Selene, Eos and yet his own mother is Gaia, the Earth before the Earth as planet, the fiber of vibration in the cosmos. As one of the Titans who overthrew their father Ouranos, Hyperion and his ilk (not before giving birth to many other deities, among them Prometheus), are in turn overthrown, by the Olympians, then to suffer various forms of imprisonment, bondage and oppression. Titans living the life of an eternal underclass, defeated, untouchable gods. The otherness of Hyperion, the one of the Romantic traditions, specifically in these works: meditations on Keats' Hyperion Fragments. Keats with such hallucinatory musical language, that must stand alone, naked, on the page, sending it's tendrils of thoughts throughout various gravitational fields. Hyperion who struggles to awake and then struggles to sleep and remains a figure of insomnia or dreaming, as if a kind of background radiation, messages of the unborn impulse potential in nature before the nature of human colonization. These voices we would like to hear on the horizon our sounds call into. Dangling over the abyss of all languages. These are the sirens and the whistling caves on the edge of the sound.