DYKSTRA, JORDAN - The Arrow of Time

"We want to fabricate a new music. We imagine a situation in which the sounding together of tones is never taken for granted, is continually renewed and reinvented. We know that the effect of any set of simultaneous tones, by means of the multiplication implicit in the harmonic series, totals much more than the number of notes played. A room can be made to vibrate with hundreds of frequencies by a single chord. We want to enter into a universe of harmony in which it becomes possible to hear into the interstices of what does not sound by means of what does sound. We will use harmony to probe one world, and when that world is known, move from it to another and another beyond that. It is with this state of mind that I listen to the music by Jordan Dykstra (b. 1985). It reawakens in me a primal fascination with the simultaneity of sound. Because of the inventiveness of its compositional strategies, the music inspires a sense of open possibility, of something yet to come, of something yet not quite with us. Dykstra has a creative impulse, shared with many experimental composers, of not wanting to repeat in one piece what he has done in another. Each work seems to begin with a moment in an empty space. When I listen carefully before each piece on this disc starts, I have a keen sense of that space. It must contain an echo of the moment just before Dykstra started writing the piece: that moment when anything can happen." - Michael Pisaro (from liner notes).