Pharoah's Tarot by Jeff Gburek

It's a very awkward moment to contemplate addressing you here in words about two events that I could not find myself able to speak about while alive, namely, the effect of Pharoah Sanders work on my life and the speechlessness that a personally felt death presents. I did not know Farell Sanders in any way, familiarly speaking. We never met. I saw him play once (ask me about that later) with Sun Ra's Arkestra in Oakland and at Knitting Factory (when there was the Knit, in Manhattan, that was it) some years later. It didn't matter much that we never met, I mean. I had always been meeting with this message here and there beyond. Because his tenor, meaning being polysemous here, caught me very early on through his almost miraculous (and to me, then, anonymous) appearance in the albums of John and Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Sun Ra and then through his own albums as band leader, blowing these multi-voiced multiphonics, creating a feather shredding voice of flight with the reed. Peace is the will of the people and the will of the land. I quote, without quotation marks, the motto we hear in the album Jewels of Thought Jewels of Thought album. Jewels of Thought. It's almost incantatory. In the work of Pharoah Sanders I always found contemplation, passion, desire and discipline to be rather unbelievably resolved on the teeter, in the flow and ebb. How he ever managed to come to terms with trauma and make them resources for a progressive mantra sand-painting constantly blowing itself to scatter after assembling the ecstatic icon and re-casting it once again is something I mainly only experience in his music and a few others. That love and peace and spirit played itself out in the sensual and conflictual worlds of the sounds he released and organically organized. Full stop to fathom with reverence. And make reference to the fact that Pharoah's Book was always on the table of my life. I'd always return to Pharoah's book in times of the need for gnosis. Pure medicine. So I threw together my cards to make Pharoah's Tarot. One of the albums I heard made by Pharoah called Pharoah I actually heard in Berlin at the home of Anzu Furukawa on an LP that was stamped with the name of her old company Dance Love Machine. Sometimes, I feel so good, giving love to you. I hope and I pray you feel the same as I do. 

Instruments: acoustic & electric guitar, zither, mandolin, ebow, voice, bird whistle, ocarina, field recordings, media captures

Guitarist, composer, sound designer, field recordist, shortwave radio poet, blending electro-acoustic, electronica, spectral comp., cracked circuits, sounding organic objects with an ear towards earth voices. Studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan and theories of Partch and Xenakis. Working with dance/theater/butoh co. Djalma Primordial Science. More than 400 concerts throughout Europe since 2005.

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