undaunted by the risk of beauty, the edges of Vardan Ovsepian's artistry resonate to the beat of his breath (at the crux of his creative urgency) like a sonic processional of "small glass figures" entranced by the dance of the immediate or the heart/when it's full.

his mind, alive with desire, engages the "still spinning images" of his youthful adventures, re-enacts, accident by accident "episode" by "episode," the artifacts of his peregrinations: Armenia, Estonia, Suomi, Boston, Newburyport & New York.

Ruminating through the "rooms" of his heightened perceptions he pauses, listens, a latter-day jannus, as the echoes fade into the memory's arsenal, as even the longest lasting rose (or "passing glance") must fade into the filigree of available imagery, to be remembered and used.

stone upon mute stone the oldtown ("Vana Linna") enchants his attentions yet refuses to yield its clandestine histories- and still he meditates upon their mysteries, beyond the intrusions of the merely nostalgic as all artists must, an exercise as necessary to the formulations of his feelings and thoughts, his requisite solitude, as an Chopin etude is....

with grace and conspicious daring Vardan's compositions sound the depths of his experience, the manifest "manyness" of his voyage from Yerevan out, until the music's immemorial vocabulary emerges refreshed inbued by his insights with the hopeful sonorities of "love and new noises"...

new noises that nuance "the passage of time" via "Yngvesson(g)" - how the sensitive timbres of her overlaid vocals expand the tonation, envelop the pitch and emotional content, penetrating, tender, an exhilirating complimentarity to Vardan's pianistics, the consumate facility of Mick Goodrick's guitar and the simpatico rhythms and colors co-improvised b Take and Josh.

the synchronous breathing of this breathtaking band of musicians unfetters the instant's intent and precisions, dlineates its singular "eventuality", and insists, resisting the pitfalls of doubt and confusion, that the forms of perfection exist, rise up like dolmens from the roilling ground of intense possibility as "never before"/ or after.

Paul Lichter
July 2002, Framington, ME.