from VØID CONTEMPLATION TACTICS
“Inter-Dimensional Music: Zen Mind Sessions”
Psychedelic ritual meditation music for beginner minds
artist – work
IKSRE – falling snow
Jay Duncan – Mondariz ft. Cha Cha
Muslimgauze – Drugsherpa (Long)
Ras Michael – Fool’s Gold
Alpha & Omega – Back Against The Wall of Babylon
Ibrahim Hesnawi – Al Hob Wal Salam
Shamek Farrah & Folks – Waiting for Marvin
Nightmares On Wax & Kuauhtli Vasquez & Wixarika Tribe – Back To Nature (Ricardo Villalobos Back To Earth Mix)
IKSRE – forest stream
annotations:
• This week’s practice begins and eventually comes to an end with some of my favorite ambient music in recent memory, an immersive album from IKSRE that “follows the arc of a traditional sound bath, expanded through field recordings and layered instrumentation that reflect water’s shifting states. Alongside crystal and Himalayan singing bowls, handpan, gongs, voice, and acoustic instruments, she incorporates bass, synthesisers, and ambient electronics.” Light percussion takes formless ambient music to a whole other level, as demonstrated by the Sadoul Ixchel selections to which I am partial. Maybe it’s because it’s comparatively easy to sustain a pleasant synth tone and play some cricket sounds, but when you start doing rhythms it’s much more obvious if you don’t know what you’re doing? IKSRE is an acronym for I Keep Seeing Rainbows Everywhere, and IKSRE knows what they are doing.
• Despite occasionally harshing the mellow with bands like Lebenden Toten, at this point ID Music is more of a heavy reggae show than a heavy metal show. This program is no exception, with surprisingly sinister nyabinghi vibes from Ras Michael vs Muslimgauze and speaker-wrecking bass from Alpha & Omega, but the riddim and voicing in heaviest rotation here at Cosmic Chambo Studio is this compilation of North African livity and lover’s rock irations from Ibrahim Hesnawi, The Father of Libyan Reggae.
• One of the ways I coped with the intensity of Zen Chaplain Trauma One Summer Camp was listening almost exclusively to Ricardo Villalobos remixes and I’m still totally mesmerized by his long-form Nightmares on Wax & Kuauhtli Vasquez & Wixarika Tribe sessions with Max Loderbauer. As with much of Villalobos’ work, the dissociative “ketamine house” tag sticks cuz I can’t remember what happens over “Back To Nature (Ricardo Villalobos Back To Earth Mix)”s 15 minutes after it ends and halfway through I think surely this is a different track, which is not surprising given all of the people contributing to the sound. Also there’s a couple people talking unintelligibly in the background through a lot of it or wait are they actually here in the apartment?
• Bandcamp is the only good social network because I know what it costs me up front. And sometimes one comes across a reissue of an impossible to find and endlessly joyous 1978 spiritual jazz love-bomb from Shamek Farrah & Friends for One Quid. It is the opposite of all of the bad vibes happening right now in the world. Shamek Farrah is one of the first jazz guys I liked who wasn’t one of the main jazz guys, and First Impressions is still end-to-end spiritual jazz burners.
On the one hand yes all jazz is spiritual but . . . if Strata-East is Spiritual Jazz does that mean Underground Resistance is Dialectical Materialist Jazz?
