The Bridge of Many Shapes
(CD and Digital Release on Mahorka, June 2025)
The idea for the title came among many dream phrases on the night of November 11, 2024
"crossing the bridge of many shapes, we will meet again, when the months grow longer, discussions going on for weeks, the Hindu and the Muslim boys carry baskets of corn, any basic coverage is universal, the girl child leads an elephant, her hand held by the elephants trunk, in her other hand five roses, there is a kind of sheep with cobalt stripes, the mango pit once peeled turns out to be an almond"
This album is a dreaming of a Trans-Eurasian Balkan psycho-archeology by means of sound. Dreaming is meant here in terms of the songlines of Aboriginal Australians who while walking sing the tribal ancestor creature's dreaming into the geography of their own activity, communing with landscape, ghosts, spirit animals. This is an act of decolonization and a dissolving of the present moment and an entry into oneiric antiquity, an imaginary return to and travels within the homeland of my ancestors once adrift in the Cucuteni-Trypillian corridor. A shamanic journey in sound back through the mirror of the earth.
The aboriginal dreaming of the totemic spirit of the land however is not enough. My ancestors removed themselves from the corridor of Ukraine, Moldavia and Romania over a century ago, moving to the USA, while now my own soul has drifted back across the ocean, again inside the strange and weathered boat of my own body, searching out harbors. In this respect, I have been able to put wind in my sails and oars into the waters via the inspiration of two Carribean authors whose works trace the double life they led as people of Africa and people of the Americas. Kamu Braithwaite who charts inside his body of work the shared border of two continents ripped apart by geological time and yet experienced from both sides, after his people were forcibly carried from Africa to Barbados. While his life took shape on a distant island far from Africa his ancestral story comes from afar to an island that appears to him like a boat sailing not only ocean but dreamtime cosmos.
Guyanese writer Wilson Harris also traces an awesome asymmetry, living in many places and displaced from many, wandering in a body tossed by chance operations and historical impositions. "Mind has ancient sorrow it does not understand, fabrics of sorrow that reach through rational experience, Mind has sadness, joy, tragedy, comedy, interlaced in indescribable ways, Mind has vestiges of everything as it longs to return to the end and the beginning of things. It longs to return to a ground of truth, in which justice lives beyond all reasoning, absolute barriers. Mind longs to return in sacred ships, to the promise of wholeness on a distant shore which is still there when an age collapses. There is a ladder between the shore of earth and the Artist's painting. We are astonished to see there a curious solidity to grief painted in solid lines, a nervous solidity to joy..." -- from The Ghost of Memory
Among the Kogi people there is said to be a series of energy line between sacred places of resource and ritual in their seasonal life cycle. They too inspire me in the concept of an Eastern European and Balkan sense of songlines. See the bibliography for more in depth descriptions. Thanks for reading and listening to The Bridge of Many Shapes and thanks to Mahorka for making the CD happen
Bibliography
-- On the Kogi concept of dark energy pulsation threads -- Aluna -- an Ecological Warning by the Kogi People https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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