When asked to write about TIAN I was sitting in a taxi in the busy traffic of Kalimpong, a North-Indian hill town. Engulfed in a never-ending chaos of honking cars, wildly bustling motorcycles, street vendors vying loudly for attention in the narrow streets, I remembered listening to the music of TIAN. With relieving joy I thought of TIAN´s continuous stream of carefully placed sounds, delicate intervals, balanced colors – a freely improvised texture breathing with respect, interactive awareness and a clear sense of timing.

So this is what it´s all about, I thought: to find meaning in less rather than more, to leave things their space, to not obscure purity with hectic activity.

When the taxi dropped us at Buddha Pada, a center for arts and buddhist studies we had heard about that morning, I went in with a sense of a lesson learned already: to listen and act as a community, to feel no need to make oneself heard, to hear no call for rivalling competition.

Back home I listened to the music of TIAN again, and again I felt that pure breathing of awareness, a welcoming attitude enriched now by the choice of titles taken from Finnegans Wake. So I hear TIAN´s “uneven” as an open offer for any listener to find their own sense of meaning in this wonderful music.

Gerhard Westerath, April 24