An excerpt from my book-in-progress’s chapter on musician Randy Raine-Reusch , reviewing his collaborave recordings with Pauline Oliveros, who just passed away. See more on her from me here and here . There are many ways to measure greatness and quanfy genius. My own chosen/fated mode is how an arst smulates my imaginaon in the medium of words—especially an arst of music, which is famous for being the thing one can’t write about unless one can dance (more, want to dance) about architecture. This excerpt, for me, is testament to the greatness and genius of both R 3 and his late great collaborator on these two CDs, Pauline Oliveros. I share it as their/her music channeled… perhaps best received as transmied, read with a bole of wine while the CDs play… Humor me now as I imagine Raine-Reusch coming to the last car on this parcular train only to discover it to be uroboric: going through its last leads him back to its first car. As the horror of the situaon creeps to dawn, he looks out the window…and sees not the tropical lush life he stepped in from, but only…BLACK, STARRY SPACE! Before he can get his head around this science ficon, Stuart Dempster suddenly appears, sees R-R’s shock, and leads him gently but firmly back to the car they shared. There he opens a door to a stairway Raine-Reusch had not seen before, leading to a second story. Gathered up there are several new (though no strangers) to this disoriented express. Pauline Oliveros has the aura (though not the air) of the group’s central personage, as its most youthful elder; a headphoned David Gamper is fiddling with some electronic devices, and Joe McPhee blows some soſt, low long tones through his pocket trumpet while gazing out into the black. Raine-Reusch looks back to Dempster with all quesons in his face; the laer responds by poinng upward. Raine-Reusch tracks the poinng finger to see that the ceiling is a skylight, and the vista beyond it not empty space but the sunlit half of the big blue marble Earth. They are moving toward it. Pauline moves to one end of the car, Stuart to the other, both to idencal levers in the up posion. They lock eyes, cock their heads back slightly and in sync, then bring them back in a simultaneous nod accompanied by a pull of their levers. As they do so, everyone in the car looks up, there to see what looks like a giganc leathery-rubbery ballonet inflang to fill an even bigger metal egg, or what will be one once its two separate halves finish meeng in the middle aſter their rise from the leſt and right sides of the car. When both full ballonet and closed metal egg are in place, blocking all view of the space above the car, Stuart and Pauline return their levers to the upright, again in sync, which causes a loud CLICK and a feeling in the gut like when an elevator starts to rise. All eyes turn to the side windows, as it quickly shows that their car’s upper level is detaching and floang away from its lower. Soon the earth is in the view of one side, sll growing larger; receding on the other is what they now can see to be a spinning disk, not unlike the classic UFO…except this one sports the yin-yang symbol on both sides, in opposite schemes of black and white. A ring of windows around its rim reveals the train they’d been on, circling its inner perimeter, apparently held there by the simulated gravity of the disk’s centrifugal spin. Pauline then beckons to Raine-Reusch to follow her, and leads him to a dual apparatus on the forward end of the car-cum-gondola. Standing inert next to each other, they look like a pair of convenonal Segways, only aached to the floor. Pauline steps onto one and it instantly transforms into the…more