Sound Peace

Longer Nights, Falling Leaves; the Start of Renewal

With the autumnal equinox, the days become shorter, and the Earth prepares for the season of transition to renewal. Though the winter to follow brings long nights, therein rest the seeds of renewal.

We find inspiration in these images of autumn in the forests of New England - and offer them with music of deep trance drums, native flutes, world instruments, and ancient Lakota and Tibetan shaman chants:

"Wakan Tankan Lila Wankan." Great Spirit, most Sacred... Gratitude leads the Shaman to his animal spirit ally. "Gate Gate Paragate Parasam Gate Bodhi Swaha." Gone, gone beyond, everyone gone completely beyond. Awake, well gone!... Transcending all that is impermanent, the Shaman crosses to spirit consciousness to help relieve all suffering of the earth and its peoples.

The title of the song is South Wind Meeting. This version (the Harvest Mix) appears along with the video on our CD+DVD two disc set, Earth Drum. The full length meditation version of the chant appears along with chants for each of the four seasons and four directions on our album Shaman's Vision Journey.

Studio notes: With this song we combined Lakota and Tibetan chants with the deep trance sounds of African dun dun drums and talking drums, Sioux frame drums, Taos rattles, acoustic guitar, ambient electric guitar and specially created drone sounds. The imagery of nature environments in the fall season help to convey the sense of the sacred and eternal within us.

Walk in Balance,
David Gordon

Begin the Begin

David and I are starting this blog because it's feels like a good way to have a deeper conversation with everyone who enjoys our music. In many ways our musical collaboration over all these years has been like an ongoing conversation. In fact, our first inspiration to record music together was about 25 years ago, when we were backpacking in the Sequoia National Forest. At that time we had discovered that meditation was a good way for us to unwind from the stress of our work as session musicians in the busy Los Angeles studio scene.

After meditating in the forest one day we were talking about how the sounds of the forest seemed to be like a musical conversation, the birds, the wind in the trees, the sound of the stream. The experience of meditating in the forest made us both feel that we too were part of that perfect serenity. We had the idea to return with our recording equipment and capture these natural sounds so that we could bring them back to our studio and then add our own musical contributions to the sounds of nature.

At the time, we had heard a few albums of music where the composers had added nature sounds but we wanted to actually compose music that interacted with the nature sounds in an spontaneous way. So the natural thing to try was to improvise. In order to make sure that our musical ideas would mesh naturally with the nature sounds, we meditated for a while in our studio before pushing the record button.

When we tried that, we felt a sense of being back up in the mountains by our favorite stream and the music flowed freely. The result was a new kind of music that we had not heard until then. At first we called that album Ambient Environment 1 because we were listening to Brian Eno those days, but when we released it we used the title Misty Forest Morning.

Since those days we have explored other kinds of music such as world fusion with Native drums and flutes and global electronica but no matter what journeys the music takes us on, in some ways we still feel like that day years ago, when we started a musical conversation with nature. There are still lots of conversations we want to have and we invite you to join us.

Walk in Balance,
Steve