Extempore - Bitternis (1979)

"People like us need the religion of despair..."-G. Flaubert
An old and lame man gathers a bouquet of twigs in a barren wilderness of dried and lifeless trees. His time ahead is short and shortens with every step. And are we all just killing time until time eventually kills us? Augustine on the subject: I know what time is, until someone asks me, then I lose my knowledge of it and cannot answer. At the most basic level, it's a mystery-- physicists and philosophers profoundly disagree about the nature of time. For Einstein it is another dimension like space, but for the standard model of quantum physics it is entirely different due to collapse of the wave function and its probabilistic nature. It feels almost as if time is the preeminent mystery of reality, the most profound and the one which, if illuminated, would lead to an understanding of the most basic structures: the universe, life, consciousness. From 14 billion years ago in birth until an eternity in the future to the universe, each one of us is like nothing though in our existences and minds we are everything. How are we to understand the end of our own beings? The greatest curse of the mind is to be given this understanding of time, the true pandora's box that cursed our species, knowing of our own nonexistence. The French call it 'le reveil mortel'-- I see it my 5-year old who wants desperately to understand what it means that so-and-so has died. This to me indicates each organism has an instinct wherein they inchoately understand the concept or it wouldn't seem so necessarily puzzling to someone who has never been close to experiencing anything like it. It's almost as if he wants us to say, it's exactly what you think it is, something horrible and terrifying that happens to 100 percent of us and will someday happen to you too. Each thought I will have had will be so much dust and atoms that is nothing at that time. Let me have metal flowers on my grave, the only kind that really last, as Renard said. Or, as I would say, put uranium 238 flowers on my grave, so in a billion years there will still be an undecayed moiety...

But to quote a less literary source, " when I die, when I'm dead and gone, there'll be one more child in this world to carry on. " (Actually 2.) What we have here is that european jazz that I can't ever get enough of, as the artist name indicates, there's a lot of improvisation -- in fact the whole of side 2 is such. It's too bad they didn't stick to more composed elements as these distinctly recall to me Exil Fusionen and other modern-fusion type compositions from Europe like Dauner's Etcetera but appear all too sporadically.

Back to the cover: I think this is one of the most beautiful covers of any record I've ever seen.