A prologue to the unseen.
The intertwined threads of two parallel designs,
a third as their composite,
each a distinct but symbiotic other.
It is not lost on me that at the exact moment that I release a piece of music entitled The Veil – with artwork of my own face behind a weave of threads, no less – people all over Iran are erupting in protests against the regime’s murder of Mahsa Amini.
The internet in Iran has been shut down to prevent news getting out uncensored, and more people have been killed.
Mahsa Amini’s death is not an exception to a rule. She is only the latest widely known victim of the regime’s repression of women’s rights in the name of religious orthodoxy.
Although in my piece a veil symbolizes something that had prevented one from seeing recurring patterns and designs for what they were/are – it certainly was not conceived as an allegory to the hijab – today, I dedicate the piece to the women of Iran, and the women elsewhere in the world fighting for their rights and equality.
Perhaps we all need to pull the veil from before our eyes and begin to finally dare to look at – and see – one another.
If you’ve been reading my newsletters in the past weeks and watching the Three Seconds | Kolme Toista preview videos, by now you will know that the music of this album did not reveal itself easily.
It was December 2020 when, after almost 8 months of wrestling with myself in the eerie calm of the pandemic – in my basement in Boston, in isolation at a cottage by Lake Saimaa in Eastern Finland, and again in my basement in Boston – and trying in vain to piece together the tiniest fragments of a puzzle without anything but a somewhat irrational instinct that the pieces somehow will fit – how, and into what, I had no idea – that finally, a breakthrough came.
I had been stuck for months looking for… something. This particular night, feeling frustrated, I started to do something I had never done before, and began to improvise with Arabic orchestral sounds on my midi keyboard.
I don’t quite know what happened, but after I came to, I realized I had written something unlike anything I’d done before, and although I understood there was much work ahead, the entire album concept came into focus – and more than that, alive – in an instant.
After so many years, the creative block was gone.
(Also, I had just gone from what I thought would be a quintet album to nonet in a matter of hours. Ah, the logistics that lie ahead…)
Listening back now, for me, The Veil is the original knot at the heart of Three Seconds | Kolme Toista, to where all its many intertwined and entangled threads can be traced, equal shades Pablo Casals, Dmitri Shostakovich, Umm Kulthum | أم كلثوم, John Coltrane, Ali Farka Touré, Paco de Lucía, Roy Hargrove and Tool. It is perhaps the most personally meaningful piece I have composed.
And so… Three Seconds | Kolme Toista begins.
Thank You for listening.
Warmth,
Jussi