liner notes by Marc Medwin: The music of Carol Liebowitz and Bill Payne inhabits a complex universe of tangential associations. Continuously eschewing cliché, these delicious and delicate miniatures bespeak diverse traditions, beholden to none. What a joy it is to hear the confluence of note and word, wire and wind, vocalization and percussion, even more so when the three artists become one! It’s no wonder that one of these conjoinings of metal, melodicized air and Mark Weber’s voice, exuding equal parts experience and gravel, gave the disc its title, rhapsodizing the departures and ever-altered macro and microcosmic returnings, dotted, looped, paused, sampled and held. The title track teems with poignant spiral-mandala spark and diminuendo for ten seconds (2:14–2:24) as Payne reaches for the heights of phrase, remapping his descent’s topography with each iteration. The synchronicity is miraculous as Liebowitz explores a rippling arpeggiated figuration just beneath, adorning it only to sweep it aside for more distant relations. True to the feeling Weber’s lines encapsulate moments earlier, each gesture is a non-acceptance of the one before, a feeling released as thought and glorious spontaneity. This music breathes freedom, but it’s easy to forget freedom’s preparation, the hours of work, of absorption, filled with the deep joy of breakthrough. Carol Liebowitz, Bill Payne and Mark Weber have traveled circuitous paths toward consciousness’s crystal center as represented by tone, time and gesture. Loving classical music, Liebowitz eventually walked away from its performance and toward the liberation offered by improvisation. Still, her minor opening of “Tempest,” tensioned and rife with anticipation, may be a nod to Beethoven’s similarly nicknamed sonata filtered through the bitonal lens of Charles Ives. “When you’re improvising, new worlds can open up.” Her voice brims with the energy of her musicmaking, and if that world’s soundscapes conjure shades of past experience, they are filtered through the tonal complexities of a present rich with her diverse musical relationships, cultivated between continents and across genres. “I just love playing with Bill! No matter what I want to do, he’s right there!” Just listen to the neo-Webernian pointillisms infiltrating the transient peaks and silent crags of “Secrets,” listen to the way reaction breeds counterpoint in phrase-groups of two and three elements. “I’ve actually been listening to quite a lot of Webern lately,” enthuses Payne. “I love the way it opens my ears!” It should be no surprise; he listens to everything, discussing, with the relish of continuous discovery, the intricacies of exhortations from Ellington and Armstrong to ceremonial musics from around the globe. “Mixtures of aroma in the smoke,” intones Weber, and it would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful or subtle aroma than Payne’s intensely delicate interjections as, like Dolphy before him, he explores the dynamic levels and overtones of a single pitch, repeating, minutely altering, as naturally and fluently as breathing in the wistful jasmine-scented comfort Liebowitz’s pianissimo harmony affords, ornamenting the rich sonorities with gracefully questioning ascent, as the poet delineates, “free, and ever reinventing itself.” Weber’s descriptive phrase is fit model as the music evolves. No two-dimensional verbiage can encapsulate the Proustian waves of major and minor juxtaposition at the heart of “Hidden Canyon,” ascending and descending in slowly freezing and melting geometric formations and regroupings. Mere descriptors and modifiers might just begin to penetrate to the essence of a f lower explosion or a desert dance, to the gnarled root of tonal complexes so vast that it’s difficult to believe that only twelve notes birthed them. Each listening reveals new angles of these tone sculptures, mandala moments connecting fore to next before disappearing into silence, the place from which all music and poetry comes and to which it will return, anticipating the curtain-call moment when the poet buries his pencil in the garden and rides off into the sunset. —Marc Medwin