bvdub :: 13 (Past Inside the Present)

The emotional resonances of this album would seem to be marred by writing a review that cannot, by its very nature, encompass the fluxing changes of musical flow and depth captured on 13. Just listen to it and be swept into a world that’s always changing, fates of people and nations rising and falling. This is something we should be unconcerned about, and instead offer our trust, care and love back to the world.

A human connection

 

The album is a meditation on the thirteenth chapter of the Tao Te Ching “which promotes humility and freedom from desire as the core elements of a peaceful existence.” Whatever I might have to say about it is rather unimportant. Those of us who have come to love the music of bvdub know that, once you get swept up in it, it’s hard to turn away. There is a human connection that occurs between the listener and the artist on these albums. I can’t say that of a lot of electronic music, which there is more and more of, every day. Too much to keep up with. Too much to listen to. When a musician comes along who pulls at your heart strings and helps you touch the world just as it falls away, at least for me, it makes me want to keep coming back. To keep up, even to a small degree, to what they are up to. To listen in, take note.

The emotional resonances of this album would seem to be marred by writing a review that cannot, by its very nature, encompass the fluxing changes of musical flow and depth captured on 13. Just listen to it and be swept into a world that’s always changing, fates of people and nations rising and falling. This is something we should be unconcerned about, and instead offer our trust, care and love back to the world.

I am reminded of this passage recently read in Ursula K. Leguin’s novel The Dispossessed just when the main character Shevek is about to go on a journey to another world. “You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

 

These words shouldn’t come as a surprise, because Le Guin was no slouch when it came to her study of the Way. Her endeavors and fifty years of study gifted us with her own translation, along with all her poetry, novels, and essays.

For the past year or so I’ve been working with and studying the I Ching, The Oracle in Benebell Wen’s great new translation. The ever changing lines of the hexagrams has been a source of great guidance over this time. I’ve long been interested in the ways the I Ching has been used by composers like John Cage and Joseph Matthias Hauer as a means of creating music through divination. In looking at chapter 13 of the Tao Te Ching I was reminded of the way the later industrial musician, drummer extraordinaire and cabalist Z’ev created permutative poems using the Psalms as a basis.

“Go down to the river, but when you listen again, it won’t sound the same.”

So, inspired by bvdub’s musical look at a single chapter of one of the world’s great sacred scriptures, and the memory of Z’ev and his gifts to the world of culture, it seemed more relevant to me, to take the words from this chapter and see how they might be changed and permutated, turned into a poem with thirteen variations rather than write a regular review. Writing this was a way to meditate on the meaning of the chapter, just as it seems making this album was a way to go deep into it for bvdub. Go down to the river, but when you listen again, it won’t sound the same.

 

13

Accept being unimportant.
Do not be concerned with loss and gain.
Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.

Thirteen permutations on the Thirteenth Chapter of the Tao Te Ching for Brock Van Wey ::

13 is available on Past Inside the Present. [Bandcamp]