Mercury Rises by Adrian Ivakhiv / vax

"Mercury Rises" is the second of a trilogy of recordings made after I purchased a Yamaha Clavinova in 2006 and began experimenting with the alternative tunings it makes available. The first, "As Pluto Descends" is the most pensive, reflective, and approachable to the casual listener (hopefully not verging too closely on "easy listening"); "Mercury Rises" is a wilder and freer partner to it; and "Distempered Landscapes" takes things into some altogether more otherworldly sonic vistas. The liner notes that follow pertain to all three of these albums; specific notes on "Mercury" follow below the next section.

AS PLUTO DESCENDS... MERCURY RISES

To a large chunk of rock floating out in deepest space, it probably doesn’t much matter what big-brained bipeds several planets over think of it. (In August, 2006, Pluto was demoted from ‘planet’ status by the International Astronomical Union.) But then why shouldn’t it? Six billion humans just might constitute the largest force of imagination the solar system has ever known (or perhaps since Mars’s demise?). The stars have always exercised a tidal pull on that imagination, an imagination that is responsible for wars, and for radical transformations of our planet’s surface.

God of the Roman Underworld, Pluto was considered to be the ruler of wealth, of the Earth’s mineral riches, and of death. His Greek counterpart, Hades, stole the maiden Persephone and brought her with him to his Underworld abode as his wife for half the year, leaving her mother Demeter in sadness while the Earth languished through the winter months.

If Pluto is descending, we can depend on Mercury, the transformer, communicator, herald of wisdom (Hermes), to remind us that Pluto's descent is always a descent into glory. His descent is an ascent (as the staircase on the "Pluto" cover is a descending one that takes us upward to the Earth outside). (The cover image from "As Pluto Descends" is a photograph of a tunnel beneath a hill at Lysa Hora, or Bald Mountain, in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Witches once congregated on the hilltop; today it is environmental activists who congregate, defending the hill from incursions of illegal developers.)

Descending in order to ascend, we humans too have seen better days.

The music on these three recordings was mostly composed, or "comprovised" (composed+improvised), in real-time single takes on the Clavinova. A small number of the pieces are rhythmically embellished or more complexly layered. The tuning system used on some of these is unusual, thanks to the fact that the Clavinova allows for easy detuning and retuning. Some of these pieces may strike some listeners as “out of tune,” in the same way that non-Western music may sound that way, or in the way that saxophone genius Ornette Coleman’s style in the late 1950s sounded "out of tune" to listeners unaccustomed to such extended note bending, though for Ornette it was a matter of bending the scale to suit the expressive needs of the music.

Why fiddle with the tuning of a piano? The Equal Tempered scale that we have all grown up with, which every piano and many other instruments are tuned to – the division of the octave into twelve equal parts – is a 17th century European invention intended to standardize the musical scale to make it easy for composers to change keys as often as they wished. This allowed for the high degree of harmonic complexity of western classical music, a complexity gained at the expense of the rhythmic and sonorous richness and earthy "groundedness" of other musics – but that’s a topic for another discussion. Until then, that scale existed nowhere in nature. What does exist is a set of natural harmonics, and it is from these that other cultures have tended to develop their scales. Westerners’ ears have been tuned to fit the standard formula, but at the expense of hearing those natural harmonies.

"Just Intonation" is the generic term for tuning systems that try to bring back some of the purity of harmonies found in nature, but which, ironically, sound out of tune to people used to Equal Temperament. Some of my pieces from 2006 onward are in variations of Just Intonation; a few, like the ones on "Distempered Landscapes," are more radically altered. The intent with those is to free up our inner tonal coordinates, like acupuncture or Tai Chi does to our bodies. The best way I know to listen to this sort of music is to crank it up and just submit to it, letting the tones resonate and wash through you as if you were earth and they were sunlight, water, clouds, storms, lightning. The initial effect may be decentering, but they will gradually massage your ears (and body and soul) back into shape, or at least break them open a little to that natural state of wonder that they were born with. Or so I hope.

The music on these recordings is dedicated to those who’ve served as my teachers and inspirations: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Cecil Taylor, Lubomyr Melnyk, Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Chick Corea, Matthew Shipp, Tanya Tkachenko, Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Dane Rudhyar, Erik Satie, Alexander Scriabin, David Michael Bunting (a.k.a. Tibet), and the many masters of Slavic Orthodox choral chant, West African kora, Javanese gamelan, etc., etc.

THIS ALBUM: MERCURY RISES

“Mercury Rises” is especially influenced by jazz virtuosos Matthew Shipp and Cecil Taylor (whose finger dexterity I only wish I could have), and also by two of their more classical (spiritual) precursors, Dane Rudhyar and Alexander Scriabin. It should probably come with a warning: the first track, "Extemporance/Trial By Fire," is intended to weed out the casual listener, or at least to scramble any fixed coordinates before settling in for the remainder of the journey. ("Extemporance": the process of removal or extraction of something from the temporal continuum. "Trial By Fire": take it to heart.) If you find it too throttling a ride, keep in mind that there will be moments of repose, and (hopefully) of beauty, but that they may require a different way of listening to set in before they can be heard.

While my reading of Charles Sanders Peirce did not truly deepen until after many of these pieces were made, I retrospectively realized that I was already searching for the kind of simple, architectural way of making sense of sonic abstraction that I was to find in Peirce's writing on “the categories,” or the “triadic” phenomenology of all things. (Peirce heavily influenced my own writing from about 2008 on, as seen in my books "Ecologies of the Moving Image" and "Shadowing the Anthropocene.") The titles of the “Triadics” series reflect that influence.

All the tracks here are real-time "comprovisations" performed on the Clavinova, recorded sometime between 2006 and the mid-2010s.

Adrian Ivakhiv (ee-VAHKH-eev) has worked in multiple genres including electroacoustic, chamber, choral, avant-rock, free improv, ambient, and experimental composition. He has made electronic music under the alias "vax" (pronounced "vah(kh)") since the 1980s, and conducted the St. Nicholas Choir in Toronto from 1987 to 2000. He lives by the Salish Sea. More info at blog (first link below).

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