Mulciber | Liner notes

The rhythm of this composition echoes a Cretan sousta, raw power traditionally administered by the lyra and the laouto. The mode and modulations were inspired by a piece of music from the Crimean Tatars. Though I have forgotten the specific piece, I am constantly reminded of its region of origin, which has once again been annexed. Descriptions of Crimea often highlight its so-called strategic position in the Black Sea, implying that its occupation brings significant military advantage. This rather circular military definition of strategy reminds us that power ultimately serves only itself.

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The name Propontis encapsulates the two sources of inspiration for this composition geographically. It is the ancient Greek name for the Sea of Marmara, the inland sea between Turkey’s European territory and its Asian mainland, connecting the Aegean and Black Seas.

Without implying that this piece is in any way traditional—it is not—its inspiration has guided the instrumentation and playing of this rendition: Asteris Varveris’ laouto and Eleanna Papanikolopoulou’s Cretan daoulaki represent the Aegean, and the lyras of Ross Daly and Kelly Thoma the Black Sea. Towards the finale, Sylvain Barou’s gajda and zurna, and Efrén López’ percussion reinforce the tension that the other four were building.

I’ve experienced rain all over the world – bringing a gust of freshness to a warm day in the tropics, making arid Mediterranean heat suffocatingly damp, a sunny spring day chilly, turning a dry bed into a torrent, or numbing my lips and fingers on a cold day while cycling. The only constant factor is that rain wettens.

Rain plays with all your senses. It may announce itself with a blue sky sky turning black or a grey one turning green, be accompanied by lightning, and leave you with a rainbow. Rain produces, releases, and enhances a variety of scents when it falls, for example, on laundry on the line, a lonely fig tree, freshly mown fields, autumn forest soils, fire ashes, plastered walls, warm pavement, brooding haystacks, or—perhaps the worst—dogs. Rain hammers relentlessly on tin roofs, rustles as it gently ripples a water surface, pitter-patters from leaky roofs or gutters, adds a hiss to traffic, muffling other sounds – either directly or by keeping people inside.

Most of my fellow citizens boast that the Netherlands is very rainy, but it is not. Most clouds that roll in from the west will have already rained out over the British Isles, at least partially. And the wettest place I ever visited was in “sunny” Spain—Santiago de Compostela to be more precise—where rain would pour down from the moment I woke up until I fell asleep. Where my shoes and clothes wouldn’t dry, and my towels slowly turned into smelly mops.

In the summer of 1999, my wife Martine (1970) and I travelled to Greece with a very dear friend, the Greek palaeontologist Kostas Theocharopoulos (1966–2001). He had been staying with us to finalize his PhD thesis, which, coincidentally, was partly based on micromammal fossils from the Aliveri site commemorated by track [13]. Due to health problems that would later turn out to be serious, Kostas had gotten stuck, so palaeontologist Hans de Bruijn (1931–2021) and I decided to invite him to the Netherlands to help him get him back on track.

Three weeks of hard work at Utrecht University paid off: the manuscript was finished. My wife and I were invited to accompany Kostas back home, meet his family, and rest a bit. We were looking forward to the trip, but his health problems—terrible migraines—were still troubling him, even though a Dutch GP had insisted they were caused by the stresses of his work. Our stay with Kostas’ family would mark the beginning of a lifelong friendship, but it was overshadowed by his rapidly worsening condition. After a couple of days, he had to be rushed to a hospital, where the cause of his migraines became apparent.

In a contrast that was almost impossible to digest, our hosts saw their world falling apart, while, at the same time, life seemed to smile at me. I had just graduated with a PhD in geology, Martine was pregnant with our son Tom (2000), and upon our return, I would begin my first job at a civil engineering agency. Under these almost schizophrenic circumstances, I remember a few occasions when Kostas’ mother, Sofia, would murmur something I couldn’t quite understand while making the sign of the cross in Martine’s direction. When I asked about it, Kostas explained that she was averting the evil eye.

I once visited an abandoned artisanal sulphur mine on the flank of an active volcano in the Caribbean. It had been dug into a fumarolic accumulation of minerals, meaning that they had formed around a volcanic vent. Next to the entrance of the mine—nothing more than a hole in the ground—there was a whitish to faintly yellow mineral encrustation. Its crystals were fattish soft to the touch, and in this particular setting, the combination of colour and hardness led me to believe that I was most likely dealing with salammoniac (NH₄Cl, ammonium chloride), the only other possibility being sylvite (KCl, potassium chloride). The distinction between these minerals is easy to make: salammoniac imparts its distinct, pungent flavour to salmiakdrop, a type of Dutch salty liquorice, while the taste of sylvite is a combination of salty and bitter. Neither mineral is poisonous, so I wanted to taste and confirm my hunch.

“Are you sure?” My fieldwork companion, a physical geographer, had not studied volcanology or mineralogy in her university curriculum. She was inclined to trust my geological knowledge but still found my diagnostic test a bit precipitous, especially since it would be nearly impossible to evacuate the site if I somehow became incapacitated. The mine can only be reached on foot, and a fireman’s carry would not have been an option for, let’s say, basic biometric reasons. I’m not easily discouraged: “Yes, but just in case I’m wrong, it was nice to have known you.” Lame joke, admittedly.

One of my oldest memories is a dream of me standing on the balcony of our family apartment, watching clouds gently descend from the sky like big, lumpy balloons. One by one, they rolled themselves in the mud of the petting zoo next to our apartment building, only to float back up again, all brown. I must have been between three and four years old, and this dream was likely an early attempt to explain why clouds can be dark.

As gentle and soft as clouds may seem, they are a form and source of one of the most formidable agents that shape the Earth’s surface: water. Heat sends it up into the skies, where it cools and condenses, eventually allowing gravity to bring it back down again. Where it falls, part of it may be absorbed by the soil and become groundwater, while the rest makes its way to the sea or a lake via streams and rivers.

Water is the great leveler: whether trickling or surging, it will ultimately grind down any obstacle in its course. This is why we fear water as much as we need it to sustain life, and why we will always try to control it. As water slackens, it drops the grains of rock it has scoured away. Each layer of sediment formed in this way becomes a page in our planet’s history book.

Chronos is often depicted as an old man with a scythe or sickle. These attributes symbolise the finiteness of time and underscore him being the antithesis of Kairos. There are only two things one can do with measured time: use it or waste it. Unfortunately, we are conditioned to experience both as a subtraction, from time planned for some specific effort, all the way up to our youth, prime, or entire lifespan. Chronos’ relentlessness instils fear: of lost opportunities, or of death. It is no coincidence that the ancient Chronos reminds of the more recent Grim Reaper.

Calendars and clocks are, of course, useful for planning and synchronising complex human activities. However, we should never forget that Chronos time does not actually exist. A clock does not measure anything; it is merely an extremely dull percussionist. Humans and other lifeforms are deeply attuned to the natural cycles of days, seasons, and life. Numbered years and weeks, named months and days, as well as the hours, minutes and seconds that the clock beats are all artificial additions, which demand constant reminders, and often induce haste and stress.

A tinker was an itenerant tinsmith who traveled around to repair tinware and other metal household utensils. His was a line of work that has gone completely obsolete. In the West, most products are now designed not to last or be repaired. We have come to accept that a thousand Euro smartphone is essentially a disposable. This would have been unthinkable even to my 20-year old self, so just imagine how incredibly wasteful our world must seem to pre-industrial tinkers, china menders, cobblers, or seamsters.

While mass production may be technologically ingenious, it requires mass consumption to sustain itself, which in its turn results in an unsustainable use of energy and raw materials. We cannot simply recycle our way out of this, at least not when it comes to disassembling products into their elemental compounds and reusing them in yet another energy-intensive production process.

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This track is a recycled melody. Our rendition is based on an arrangement that Dutch musicologist and musician Wouter Swets (1930–2016) made for his ensemble Čalgija. It was first released on Music from the Balkans and Anatolia #2 (1991) and also features on Unforgotten (2020).

I learned the piece from Roelof Rosendal (1955–2021), who was member of Čalgija from 1974 to 1984, playing percussion, the oud, and a variety of bagpipes. I must have been 16 or 17 – he had asked me to help him paint his houseboat in Gouda and bring my then brand-new Macedonian tambura.

After the paint job was done, we ate takeout fu yong hai with steamed rice and played some music, with me accompanying Roelof as he played the gaida. One of the pieces we studied was this one (‘Razložko kalajdžijsko horo’). We first listened to Čalgija’s recording of it—still unreleased at that time—and I was excited to then try it with with one of the original musicians.

Aliveri is a small industrial town on the southwest coast of Evia, the second largest Greek island. Evia is located so close to the Greek mainland that, according to folklore, it was separated from it by an earthquake. One could argue that the area practically screams geology, to the extent that even laypeople develop theories about it.

In fact, Evia holds some of the keys to the geological understanding of the Eastern Mediterranean, and, aside from its tectonic structure, this is due to the discovery of fossils.

The famous Aliveri palaeontological site was discovered in 1977 by palaeontologists Hans de Bruijn (1931–2021) and my father, Albert van der Meulen (1940–2025). This was the year when my mother decided to join her husband on a fieldwork trip for the first time, which in turn led to my first, formative encounter with Greece, its people, and their music.

[Skip this text box if nerdiness annoys you] — As a rule of thumb, the smaller the life form, the larger their numbers, so fossil assemblages collected from continental deposits such as the lignites of Aliveri, are typically dominated by rodents, in which De Bruijn and my father specialised.

Two premolars of the Miocene pika Albertona balkanika¹

Mind you, you will never find a complete rodent skeleton. Either due to exposure to the elements, or from being eaten by a predator, the rodent body disintegrates, leaving behind scattered individual bones and teeth that palaeontologists retrieve from sediments through sieving. Molars, in particular, preserve well in the geological record, and their morphologies are species-specific – more so than, for example, bones.

In 2019, staff of the Geological Survey of the Netherlands identified a deeply buried Jurassic volcano in the Dutch sector of the North Sea. It was active around 150 million years ago, near the present-day location of the Azores, in a foregone landscape resembling the East African Rift Valley. The volcano rafted northward on the moving Eurasian Plate, which had begun to rift away from the North-American Plate, leading to the birth of the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, the volcano went extinct and was gradually buried under about 3 kilometers of sediments deposited in the subsiding North Sea Basin.

Shortly after the volcano’s discovery, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Just hours before the first lockdown measures were announced, one of our press officers asked if I wanted him to issue a press release. I suggested he hold off – I couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in a dead volcano while a global health crisis was unfolding. I was quite wrong. Locked in their homes, people were craving for good news, and when we eventually did send out a press release, the volcano made national and international headlines.

Quite a while ago, someone remarked about a new composition of mine—I’ve forgotten which one—that “again, Michiel managed to avoid all the clichés.” I initially took this as a compliment, but then I realised that avoiding clichés is like avoiding landmines: nothing to be proud of if you were unaware of them. For fun—and perhaps a bit of redemption—I decided to write a piece made entirely of clichés, ending up with this vernacular, earwormy, chasapiko.

My initial idea was to have the piece played on a laterna (λατέρνα), a once-popular Greek/Turkish portable barrel piano that was played in the streets. However, the prospect of hammering as many nails into a wooden cylinder as there are notes in the piece seemed rather forbidding. Fortunately, I don’t know anyone who owns, builds, or even plays a laterna.

I then thought of a Dutch street organ (draaiorgel), which could be considered the Northwest-European counterpart of the laterna. This would involve punching as many holes in an organ book (essentially a folded punch card) as nails in the cylinder – an endeavour that seemed only slightly less daunting. Fortunately, I don’t know any barrel organ builders or grinders either.

However, it turned out that a historic Dutch street organ had been sampled to create a virtual instrument. The world of electronic music is one I never dared to enter, but I realised that a mechanical instrument and a virtual instrument are essentially the same. There is no fundamental difference between an organ book driving physical organ pipes and a MIDI file driving sampled ones: neither involves a human musician. So I tried it – and creating and rendering an organ track turned out to be surprisingly easy.

The result was good, except for one thing: it is unnatural to hear a street organ in an acoustically sterile environment. I asked Rotterdam-based musician and sound artist Cengiz Arslanpay to fuse the virtual and real worlds. We began by recording the soundscape of the Binnenrotte street market in Rotterdam, which would allow us to bring the organ back to where it belongs: outside.

The most natural way to end the liner notes of a geologically themed music album is to ask whether geology and music are somehow related, or could be. Cultures are certainly shaped by the environments in which they develop, and I see no reason why this should not extend to music. However, I suspect it would be very difficult to isolate the influence of geology from that of other, possibly more dominant, determining factors such as history, language, technology, climate, and nature, and investigating this is certainly beyond my abilities.

Perhaps there is a more simple relationship, because what I can say is that the way we experience sound is clearly influenced by terrain, and it seems only natural that this affects music. I come from a very flat country, for example, where sound travels in a straightforward manner. It may be muffled by vegetation, dampened by snow, or carried clearly over water, but there is a direct, simple, relationship between distance and volume.

By contrast, mountainous regions are the acoustic equivalent of a hall of mirrors, where the source of sounds can be difficult to pinpoint, cliff faces shout back at you, and thunderstorms become IMAX-theatre experiences. And then there are differences in native sounds, for example, torrents roaring versus creeks babbling, or the sound of cows walking in a soggy peat meadow versus that of mountain goats loosening rubble as they climb.