These pieces are adventures, are of love, an insatiable desire seeking the pit or the center of our essence but through ease and truth. kostochki means bones, seed, pit in russian a word Anya Shatilova spoke to me first at NEC in the dining hall.
Through astrology, I have learned about timing throughout the year and a Taoist way of ease and intuitive clairvoyance. Every month, every moon cycle, everyday, and every mood serves a purpose. Like a tree shedding its leaves going dormant to blossoming we humans have cycles in seasons that are unified and parallel.
kostochki is a grouping of pieces composed between 2018-2020, so , upon reflecting for years about this music I have found it to remain new and mysterious, sensual, spiritual, romantic, unique and ultimately, powerful throughout my various metamorphoses throughout these past few years. At this same time of composing and beginning these sets of works (2018-2020) I was living at my great friend, mentor and unofficial & official auntie/grandmother Ruth Lepson's house. This place hosted so much magic not only for me but for the greater community of artists, poets, philosophers, musicians, doctors … you name it. Ruth had a house that was for togetherness, for understanding, for development. This place allowed me time to understand and explore knowledge, read, paint, compose and meet many new people as Ruth is an established and wonderful poet and educator who is beloved around the world but very much in Cambridge and in greater Boston. She encouraged me to further my understanding and to research. So many conversations started with her saying “do you know?” When the answer was repeatedly “no” I was reminded that my knowledge was so limited. I began to research and read heavily instead of going back to get a master's degree. My parents, care, about, education - knowledge will set you free. This time at Ruth’s was my master's degree.
Mentors like Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer, and artists such as Morton Feldman, Alexander Scriabin, Anthony Braxton, Tyshawn Sorey, Sun Ra, the AACM, Giacinto Scelsi, bossa nova and Karlheinz Stockhausen were all in my ears. partly because of the fanaticism that the New England Conservatory had about many of these composers, but also my understanding that these composers and mentors were/are doing something original and different. They all were doing something that wasn't done before them. I started to understand that there was a lack of flexibility existing within “flexible” music. I desperately wanted music that was an adventure like in a film. I was on an adventure, Emma Burge and Phillip Golub were the closest most trusted and loved individuals in my life. Emma and I explored the whole US together, we met an individual Tom who invited us to live in his childhood home in Seattle as we visited my old friend Carlos who is another very loved friend and also saw Julian Weisman, such a good guy. Tom listened to this music, he saw us as people he trusted with the future. He invited us to Seattle. But when writing this music there was Maine, Ruth's house in Covid, the road trip, the recording, the composing for Emma specifically giving her a piece that would allow her to sing to be completely herself, to show the sensitivity and passionate nature and a spiritual sense that was bright and light grey and interesting. I loved David Lynch especially at this time, and he has been a light in the sky for my adventures in life, the blue rose, the owls, the streets, the dreams, the dreams. The pie, the coffee, the coffee. Fellini and Antonioni also changed and enriched my perspective in storytelling with the ability to have stillness and show a richness in a moment. Then that word perspective became my new obsession. It changed to the word dimension. That's where scientists and the mystics came in. What is it to understand and listen and to think in four dimensions? How can we transcend time? How can I communicate with people in the present in four dimensions? Through painting I saw this problem even more! Why am I using a 3D, 2D surface that is in a 3D World to create an illusion by adding on 3D material yet the process in time creates a life completely a 4 dimensional experience? What is it but clairvoyance, understanding past, present and future at once yet allowing it to be improvisatory and flexible knowing that the restriction of medium is there but to understand that the destination is there, yet flexible allowing restriction to be an object of flexibility. This is the way I live life. Through painting, through desire for depth in conversation, in love and in thoughts.
The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho
Through more, I found Dane Rudhyar, another light in my sky. Shasta, the Lemurians, Saturn. The ultra-modernist haha i mean futurist, influenced composers like Giacinto Scelsi, and John Cage with his thoughts that were so precise and so beautiful. Rudhyar would speak about astrology in a way that a chart is understood not by your sun sign, or moon sign but as each part of your chart and the whole in being but simultaneously. It is math, not science. It has no application until you incorporate philosophy with it. Because the positions of planets are changing so much every day, every moment, you not being a stationary being but being one that has an essence that is to be developed through understanding each part of mind, love, action, luck, limitation, dreams, emotion, etc (each planet’s representation) but allowing yourself to guide with the times understanding. What part of yourself will shine at any time in history and in the future. This is also the task of the Buddha of clairvoyance and the Alchemy of everything in life to have wholeness. He spoke about music as magic, as magic itself. Tie this to the stars. But now let's do it with music, improvisation and with story. This time in life and at Ruth’s house indelibly changed and altered my life in way too many ways to state but allowed my understanding that I desired to solidify abstraction into a magical realism, a way of creating, living and understanding that engages every moment, lifetime, living being with love and openness and beauty not a halting fear that creates a diminution of one's happiness.
-Mario Layne Fabrizio
Emma Burge - violin & voice
Phillip Golub- piano
Mario Layne Fabrizio- percussion, voice, piano
“The whole and the parts mutually and reciprocally modify and influence each other”
Dane Rudhyar
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