Anitya

The first of the splicing experiments I ran last weekend — the same run that produced Vernalia and Tessellation.

The name

Anitya (ah-NIT-ya) is Sanskrit, and one of the load-bearing ideas in Eastern philosophy. It means impermanence. Inconstancy. Continuous change.

The claim underneath it is that nothing is static — not in the physical world and not in the emotional one. Everything, however solid or monolithic or settled it looks, is mid-transition: arising, changing, coming apart, becoming the next thing.

Which is more or less how this piece is built. It never holds a shape for long — delicate acoustic passages give way to enormous mechanical ones, and each landscape has to break before the next one can exist. That isn’t a structural accident. It’s the argument.

What’s in it

Twenty-six minutes of progressive instrumental in one continuous movement — odd time signatures, and a lot of deliberately complicated geometry. The instruments range wide: vina, sitar, several kinds of guitar, jaw harp, didgeridoo, and more besides.