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“Impermanence at the Glass House” is a performance film in six parts by Derrick Belcham, featuring dancers Rebecca Margolick and Stephanie Crousillat, captured over a single day at architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House museum. The film follows the arc of Impermanence, beginning with “Karuna”.

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From director Derrick Belcham:

“It is rare to find a project in which each element is a person, practice and aesthetic that I love completely.  The sound of Peter’s performance reflecting off the surfaces and enclosures, Rebecca and Stephanie’s spatial relationship with the architecture of the Glass House, the visual reflection of the House itself, the exchange of words and chords with the bodies of the dancers augmented by Natasha Takemoto and Joy Wolcott’s perfectly-toned garments created a beautiful world to explore with the camera.  These dynamic partnerships allowed for theater-level exploration as the events were captured in a single take and single shot.”

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Some background can be found here.

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Stills from the film:

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“The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”   - Alan Watts

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“Karuna”

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“New York”

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“Gone Beyond”

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“Maya”

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“Ahimsa”

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“Impermanence”

Impermanence is available throughout the known universe to hear here & here now.

Impermanence is a cycle of songs.

Impermanence is a meditation.

Impermanence is an awareness.

Impermanence is a process.

Impermanence is in constant motion.

Impermanence is gradual evolution.

Impermanence is incremental.

Impermanence is continual transformation.

Impermanence is recurring.

Impermanence is indomitable.

Impermanence is uncertainty.

Impermanence is a period of calm followed by an unanticipated interruption.

Impermanence is things going just fine until something happens.

Impermanence is the zen of emergencies.

Impermanence is pretty scary, actually.

Impermanence is decay.

Impermanence is learning the value of a thing by its absence.

Impermanence is losing some of you on the way to losing all of you.

Impermanence is having every last bit of you stripped away piecemeal.

Impermanence is being temporary by design.

Impermanence is an implied ending.

Impermanence is beginningless and endless, though.

Impermanence is circular.

Impermanence is a return to the start of Impermanence.

Impermanence is 36 minutes long. 

Impermanence is 108 minutes long by the end of the 3rd consecutive listen.

Impermanence is recurring.

Impermanence is naturally occurring.

Impermanence is growth.

Impermanence is addition by subtraction.

Impermanence is regeneration.

Impermanence is everything changing because everything IS change.

Impermanence is quantized to the rhythm of the breath.

Impermanence is birdsong becoming crickets.

Impermanence is rolling waves.

Impermanence is just a word for something without a real name.

Impermanence is what it is.

Impermanence is.

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Written by Peter Silberman between 2013-2016 in Brooklyn, NY; Block Island, RI; Somers, NY; Woodside, CA; Big Sur, CA; Portland, OR; Saugerties, NY

Produced by Peter Silberman & Nick Principe

Engineered by Nick Principe at People Teeth in Saugerties, NY

Mixed by Andrew Dunn

Mastered by Joe Lambert

Nature recorded in Woodside, CA; Big Sur, CA; Block Island, RI

Peter sang, played various guitars, rhodes, pedal steel, accordion, & tibetan bowl throughout

Nicholas Principe played percussion on Karuna, Gone Beyond, Ahimsa, snapped his fingers & sang doo-wop on Gone Beyond

Hana Tajima sang doo-wop on Gone Beyond

Kelly Pratt played flutes & brass on New York

Michael Lerner played percussion on Gone Beyond

Tim Mislock played guitar on Gone Beyond

David Moore played piano, pump organ, & farfisa on Impermanence

Peter Tullio practiced Ujjayi breath on Karuna & Impermanence, & snapped his fingers on Gone Beyond

Management by Dawn Barger & Chris Robbins, Post Hoc Management

Cover photography by Justin Hollar

Design and packaging by Zan Goodman

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 “You suffer because things are impermanent and you think they are permanent.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

Hear here.

Ahimsa usually translates from Sanskrit as “non-harming”, which I take to mean practicing a non-violent attitude toward others and myself.

I wrote the song as a personal encouragement to cultivate that awareness whenever possible, to be less knee-jerk reactive, to snap to fewer judgments, and above all, to be patient. I need this reminder often.

“Ahimsa” is also my ridiculous wish: for a unanimous period of calm and safety, for one whole day of peace. I mostly think this is an impossible goal.

But I hold on to some small hope that it can be reached by an incredibly long road, walked with microscopic steps, by creating harmonious moments and stringing them together, one-by-one, over the course of many lifetimes.

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Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Featuring Nicholas Principe on percussion

Produced by Peter Silberman & Nicholas Principe

Engineered by Nicholas Principe at People Teeth in Saugerties, NY

Mixed by Andrew Dunn

Mastered by Joe Lambert

Hear here.

“New York” is a lament for a relentlessly impermanent place.  It’s a song of estrangement from streets that became unrecognizable in no time, and the end of a dissociation from sounds I’d come to ignore. I’ve strung together this video from collections of footage archived in the public domain, from open-sourced memories of an obsolete city that maybe never was. Through reorganizing these aimless images, I found a story of flight from crowded cacophony, a quiet struggle against New York’s stubborn gravitational pull, and a memory just beyond reach.

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Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Featuring Kelly Pratt on flute & horns

Produced by Peter Silberman & Nicholas Principe

Engineered by Nicholas Principe at People Teeth in Saugerties, NY

Mixed by Andrew Dunn

Mastered by Joe Lambert

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Photo by Hana Tajima in 2014

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Impermanence will be released February 24th 2017, on Anti- & Transgressive.

You can pre-order it here.

You can hear the album’s first piece, “Karuna” here, courtesy of NPR.

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Karuna translates as “compassion”, but the song speaks to its absence, calling out to a kindness just out of earshot.

It’s my disoriented plea for inaudible protection from the audibly merciless,

My vertigo at the cliff of unprecedented change, bracing for suffering in light of receding hope.

“Karuna” is my voice, inundated with emptiness, reiterating compassion,

Throwing a coin down a deep well, waiting for a reassuring splash to interrupt an alarmingly long fall.

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Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Featuring Nicholas Principe on percussion & Peter Tullio practicing Ujjayi breath

Produced by Peter Silberman & Nicholas Principe

Engineered by Nicholas Principe at People Teeth in Saugerties, NY

Mixed by Andrew Dunn

Mastered by Joe Lambert

Artwork by Zan Goodman & Justin Hollar

Listen here.

Alan Watts wrote, “The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.”

Like nearly everyone I know, I contend with this daily - to accept the transitory and experience shifting tectonic plates as passing clouds. I’ve dedicated much of the last few years’ creative effort to embracing this unflinching force of nature. Change is a heartbeat, evidencing life.

And so "Slips Away" is my preliminary meditation on this idea. The piece was written and recorded earlier this fall, largely in a secluded cabin upstate, surrounded by talkative crickets and tall old trees losing leaves.  

I now recognize a bit of a paradox in attempting to capture transience in song, freezing a passing moment in space and time, preserving impermanence… so the best I can reconcile this is to think of Slips Away as a most basic reminder.

Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Recorded September 2016 at Watcher’s Woods in Spring Glen, NY and People Teeth in Saugerties, NY

Engineered by Peter Silberman and Nicholas Principe

Mixed by Andrew Dunn

Transcendless Summer is an ambient instrumental piece written and recorded over the course of one afternoon, back in August of 2013.

You can listen to it here. You can download it here. People Teeth made a limited run of cassettes. You can order yours here.

Some context...

I’d been spending the better part of that summer in Portland, OR, during a pause midway through the Brooklyn-based Familiars sessions. One evening, as an extension of a thought-experiment, Nicholas Principe match-made engineer Tim Shrout and me, and we chose a date to track something.

Biking across town to the session a few days later, I had no agenda. When I encountered the studio’s vivid arsenal of vintage gear, I didn’t have any concrete ideas. And when Tim (who had so generously donated his time, space, and expertise) asked me what I wanted to do, I didn’t really have an answer. I only hoped to liberate the pent-up potential energy of the moment.  

Listening to its twenty minutes now, I experience a fleeting era distilled into a single day. I hear the first few miles of a long ride, hands released from handlebars’ grip, arms splayed out to the sides, coasting with abandon, rounding a blind corner without worry for what might slam into me beyond the immediately visible.

In the three years since Transcendless Summer’s spontaneous birth, the color’s bled and faded some, filled in with a wiser vibrance only time could provide. These tracks have felt three summers melt away, relearning the same cruelty each year: that summer’s start initiates a countdown to its end, that the first day’s light stretches infinitely outward before shrinking back from a dilating night.

Written & performed by Peter Silberman

Engineered by Tim Shrout at Jalopy in Portland, OR

Mixed & mastered by Andrew Dunn in Brooklyn, NY

Cover photograph by Peter Silberman

Additional 2013 photography by Hana Tajima