The Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage ensemble performs live at the Grimm Museum in Berlin “Blues Dhikr Al-Salam (Blues Al Maqam)” and “Nur/Soliton(e) Star” from Catherine Christer Hennix with Robin Hayward (microtonal tuba), Hilary Jeffery (trombone) and Amelia Cuni (voice). They weave their disciplined improvisations through sound sculptor Michael Northam’s “time-mirage delay” system. The piece’s warm, extended brassy tones act initially as a primer to help the listener settle into an experiencing of harmony without melody, through which rich details emerge, like a microscope zooming into sound to find each note teeming with life. These natural resonances create a sense of moving smoothly at a constant slow speed, like being carefully lowered into a bottomless abyss, the base of which begins to display fractal properties as you sink ever-deeper. Out of this awe-inspiring environment voices emerge. Unadorned by vibrato, their near-perfect pitches gild the drone with organic and ritualistic qualities. The only rhythmic elements come from colliding harmonics – musical matter that’s not deliberately ‘played’ or ‘conceived’, but arises like an apparition from the equilibrium – so any sense of duration is happily obscured.