Igra Staklenih Perli: Inner Flow / Unutrašnji toke deutsch

The five of them met by accident. That is, if you don´t believe in the immanent laws that govern our lives and actions. It was an encounter of people who were a bit different in their attitudes towards life and in musical tastes, but yet had something in common: a need to create and explore beautiful and strange and frightening spiritual places for the pure joy of it. Although they were fortunate enough to spend different periods of their lives at various points of this planet, the place of their encounter was as strange as if they came from outer space – the Balkans, where their home land is.

Each of them had experienced different influences while they developed their consciousness. They listened to Pink Floyd, Can, Tangerine Dream, Yes and Jimi Hendrix, they read Hermann Hesse, Castaneda, the “Tibetian Book of the Dead“ and they seldom did anything important without consulting the I Ching.

So their energies met. And together, they started to create their world, finding out that the most adequate means in materializing it were the sound and their love for sound images. They rarely did proper “rehearsals“. Every meeting was meant to establish new frontiers of perception – and they always had a demanding audience: themselves.

By the time they realized they had something worth showing to the others, they decided to get on stage. There again, they didn´t really distinguish between live performances and “rehearsals“. And soon enough, the word spread among the people – Igra Staklenih Perli, Das Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Beads Game became a band with “something else“, a group of people that had the power to work out some magic for everyone who was ready to be there.

As Pedja, the percussionist, says: “You watch yourself playing, your hands move seemingly without volition, you percieve yourself “knowing without knowing“ what will happen next, you feel that sound has set several – sometimes quite a lot – minds “in phase“, that you´ve cast yourself in an incredible procession of psychical landscapes. The collective sphere of awareness is expanding, the spiritual eye opens, you feel an ever expanding number of minds joininig you and then you “remember“ that you´re on stage and you see those faces in rapture and you realize that you´ve taken them somewhere they´ve never been before. Somewhere even you´ve never been before, that even for one moment we´ve managed to make ourselves ONE. Wow! That moment of oneness is worth hundreds of gigs!“

All that happened at the end of the Seventies. It isn´t very difficult to imagine the conditions for rock music in Yugoslavia at this time, really unfortunate for the young players and even worse for the alternative musicians. Members of the Glass Beads Game found themselves spending more and more time arguing with the record company and less and less in the creative process. And the joy had gone. Although they were the first band in Yugoslavia to use laser on stage, although they managed to control sound and lights on stage themselves while playing, after two records they were forced to accept the fact that the obstacles and the lack of comprehension of those “in power“ were too big to be overcome. And so they stopped.

The tapes you are about to witness were never published before. They´ve waited silently for their moment to come. And in spite of all those years, the essence of their music remains very much alive – one is still amazed by the level of “oneness“ they succeeded to achieve. Anybody who ever attended their live performances would be able to recognize that spiritual feeling, so rare and so unique. Something that was so unexpected at that time, something that is still quite a surprise for the listeners. The Glass Beads Game wish you wellcome in the Inner Flow of their world of sound.

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They came from outer space, gliding effortlessly on the Inner Flow that permeates this universe. After brief sojourn at different points of this tiny globe, they met at the navel of this dimension and, finding their vibrational level matched perfectly, decided to give birth to some powerfull magic. Planets trembled in their courses, each quasar missed one blink to stare at this marvel and earthly astrologers puzzled over a strange set of conjunctions and oppositions. Taking material forms they used this magic to leed the elect through the portals of time and space and play this new game. And after it was completed they assumed new forms, waiting for the new cycle of rebirth to start another game …

Written 1991 by Predrag Vuković & Vesna Jakovljević.

Published 1992 as insert of the Kalemegdan Disk LP KD 002 Igra Staklenih Perli: Inner Flow / Unutrašnji tok.