THE FORWARD PROCESS

In a somewhat inconspicuous passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi classic The Dispossessed, its main character — the brilliant physicist Shevek — meets a composer who has translated Shevek’s revolutionary theories into music:

‘I’m writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. [Several] instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony.’

While not separate from the overall context and complex topics of freedom, social constraints and the paradoxes of an ‘ambiguous utopia’ that make this novel one of the absolute masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction, Le Guin’s poetic and beautifully developed projection of time — through Shevek’s theory — as being both sequential and cyclical, carries otherworldly yet immediate musical implications that resonated deeply with me. In following Le Guin’s unique world-building narrative, I wondered: what would such a composition sound like, and how would it be performed?

I found these ideas particularly inspiring to explore in a small-ensemble setting, integrating Mariam Rezaei’s unique approach to the turntables alongside Sakina Abdou’s saxophone and myself on guitar. The sequential and cyclical experiences of time are thus quite literally represented in the instrumentation, though the roles are never fixed. I aimed to write a set of compositions that allow each musician to explore the material in their own way, drawing on Henry Threadgill’s timeless post-tonal intervallic system to open further spaces for improvisation. Rezaei’s turntables, while at times functioning as an extended rhythm section, regularly reintroduce past versions of the guitar and saxophone through pre-recorded samples — fragments that are then transformed atop the present, live parts of Abdou and myself. As a hybrid trio, we play between cycles and sequences, lines and circles, past, present, and future all at once; non-linearity as default, yet all part of one simultaneous forward process. This entangled sequential-and-cyclical conception of musical time unfolds throughout The Forward Process, except for Urras (1–3), which serve as dreamlike sonic interruptions, resetting the sequences and cycles.

It has been an incredible privilege to develop and arrange these ideas with Mariam Rezaei and Sakina Abdou. Their commitment, openness, creative energy, and generosity on both a human and artistic level (although I’m not sure these can really be separated) were essential in shaping the result. As a trio, we decided to go by the name 1984, a shared year of birth whose Orwellian counterpart feels all too reflective of current times. Yet, following Le Guin, our aim is to translate that resonance into gorgeously beautiful, noisy, utopian, complex, dreamlike, experimental sounds.

Kobe Van Cauwenberghe

DROPA DISC #016