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  TITLES:
CD 1
1. ANADROMI (RECOLLECTIONS)
2. MIROLOI (LAMENT)
3. TORTOISE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
TEACH ME TO MOVE SLOWLY (FROM A POEM OF DAVID HELLER)
4. KANBADRI ALEK
(INFLUENCED BY THE TRADITIONAL MUSIC OF SUDAN)
CD 2
1. ELEFTHERO SIMIO
2. ISHTAR


It's been almost 20 years since I realized this recording and, despite all that has taken place from then until now, it still remains my favorite work of all that I have done thus far. The circumstances of the recording were rather unusual. I would go at regular intervals to the studio without any plan as to what I intended to do and without any serious intent of actually releasing the final result of my efforts. It was more of a personal quest for me which was quite unrelated to any of the other "professional" recording activities that I was engaged in at the time. Very quickly however this project became somewhat of an obsession and I stopped doing anything else and, for about a year, concerned myself with it alone, to the exclusion of all else. The end result was that my whole approach to music changed radically and I found myself unwilling and indeed unable to go back to my former ways of composing, playing or even just thinking about music. From very early on in my life I had been aware of music as being the language of my dialogue with whatever I perceived to be "sacred". I use the word sacred in a very broad sense, and certainly not as it is usually used by the traditions of organized religion. This "dialogue" has at different times in my life brought me into close contact with a wide variety of seemingly unrelated and even incompatible genres of music which are variously labeled (classical, folk, contemporary, world music, etc.) as well as with all sorts of other idioms which are perhaps not so easily pigeon-holed by the music industry.

For me personally these labels are utterly meaningless on any deeper level and they are only relevant on an extremely superficial one merely for the sake of very basic archival reference. For me music is music and my interest in it has to do essentially with its esoteric spiritual dimension and hardly at all with its exterior formal aspects. This interest in the more esoteric aspects of music eventually led me to the vast and timeless domain of modal musical traditions. Here in this immense and enormously diverse musical universe I finally found exactly what I personally was looking for. There was something very powerful and immediate in certain pieces that I heard which, regardless of the specific tradition from which they came, went straight to the very core of my being opening up whole new musical dimensions as they went. This, for me, was a totally new experience with music completely unlike anything I had ever experienced before. As a result I began a very long journey of study and research into various modal musical traditions which entailed extensive travel and long apprenticeships under the guidance of many great masters.

This process lasted for more than 25 years and through it I was initiated, on the one hand, into the trans-temporal, trans-personal, archetypal world of modal music in general, and, on the other, into the socio-ethno-historical complexities of specific regional traditions. These two aspects of almost all of today's existing modal musical traditions I had always perceived as being, at best, somewhat contradictory and, in some cases, they even appeared irrelevant to one another. During my travels it became somewhat of a matter of course for me to hear a musician play something that would make every hair on my body stand on end, which seemingly could have been composed at any time between 3000 years in the past to 3000 years in the future, and which, in the moment that I heard it, seemed to belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It was also a matter of course that this self-same musician would, in his attempt to describe his music and his experience of it, usually make extensive references to various mundane social or historical events that would often seem thoroughly unrelated to the experience one had just had while listening to his playing.

I spent many years trying to reconcile this contradiction, as I perceived it, and finally the contradiction simply disappeared in the face of the realization that every musician quite simply needs something like a "mythology" as a means of describing that which cannot be described, and of approaching that which is indeed simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. This "myth" was actually a tool for occupying one side of one's self, the "conscious" side, so that another, which works on a deeper archetypal level could come into a more direct contact with a source of inspiration which is far too powerful to be encountered directly by that which we normally consider to be our consciousness. Lest anyone imagine that this is some very obscure "metaphysical" experience, I can assure you that it isn't. It is a phenomenon of everyday life that is experienced by everyone, each in his own way, and, indeed, it is usually far more easily observable in people who appear thoroughly unconcerned with anything even remotely "metaphysical". The end result of these observations was the realization that I would only be able to approach my own source of inspiration through a "mythical" dimension specifically relevant to my own reality and not through one borrowed from any given tradition to which I did not and would never belong.

This conclusion turned out to be half correct. Of course an important part of using the "myth" as a tool is that of actually believing wholeheartedly in it, but it is equally important, on another level, to maintain a certain very slight detachment from it in order to connect directly with one's source of inspiration. Balancing these contradictions is a very difficult task and the effort to do so occupied my efforts over the span of many years. The whole process of composing and creating Elefthero Simio however, was, for me, a liberation from this contradiction and the beginning of something completely new. From that point on I could no longer create or sustain "myths" to define my awareness of my musical worldροι. In fact it no longer made any sense to in any way define musical activity or my or anyone else's awareness of it. The new reality was that I quite literally did not know what I was doing and it was exactly that state of not knowing that actually enabled me to do it. A new contradiction which seemed even worse than the previous one? This contradiction, however, had a certain serenity about it which was very conducive to creating music, and which seemed to be providing me with energy rather than draining me of it. It certainly defied my powers of analysis to comprehend it in the usual manner, so it made more sense just to go with it in the hope that I would understand more as I went along. As I went along I did indeed find myself increasingly immersed in a musical dimension in which I could actually live and even belong in such a way as was previously unfamiliar to me. My previous experience of music as the language of my dialogue with the sacred was now replaced by something which I perceived to be much deeper. Silence now became the medium for this "dialogue with the sacred" and that simply inspired me to make music. That is perhaps the best and indeed only explanation that I can offer for the title Elefthero Simio (Free Point), as well as for everything which I have been doing in music ever since.

Ross Daly
Houdetsi 2008