Tag: cosmic

David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir – Hearing Solar Winds, 1983

“This recording was made in L’Abbaye du Thoronet, a 12th-century Cisterian monastery in Provence, where I had previously brought the choir in 1978. The simple harmonic geometry of the abbey seemed perfectly proportioned to magnify the choir’s music and let it resonate within its sacred space. Working there was an incredible challenge: our sensations, our breathing, and even our thoughts and emotions became intensely amplified.”

–David Hykes, liner notes

Hearing Solar Winds is a milestone for the human voice. Much of Hykes’s work originates from Tantric Tibetan Buddhism and western Mongolian khöömi, or overtone singing. Yet in this context, recorded live in a French abbey over the course of two evenings, it’s a completely different beast from traditional throat singing. It’s less active and more drawn out, less human and more ghostly. It shimmers–did a songbird get trapped in the abbey, or was someone playing an unimaginably tiny glass flute? “Telescoping,” and of course “Rainbow Voice,” quite literally sound like light being split through a prism: when producing harmonics, “the voice acts as a kind of sonic prism, ‘refracting’ sound along a frequency spectrum which extends upward from the fundamental tone.”

Elsewhere, Hearing Solar Winds is as much about sonic illusion as it is overtones. Several tracks employ the Shepard scale, which is a “sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves, with the base pitch of the tone moving upward or downward. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a ‘sonic barber’s pole.'” Upon first listen, the effect is disorienting and even a bit nauseating, as it’s difficult to understand where you are, tonally. If you don’t mind losing track of your body, Hearing Solar Winds becomes less of an album and more of an hour long meditation–cosmic not because of shimmering synth pads or floating arpeggiation (there are none) but because of its direct sonic verticality. This is the real deal.

Incredibly, Hearing Solar winds is David Hykes’s first album. He went on to release five more albums with the unbelievably precise Harmonic Choir, and five more without them. (Side note: “Rainbow Voice” was featured in the soundtrack for Dead Poets Society.) He’s worked extensively with sound healing and spirituality, developing a comprehensive approach to “contemplative music” called harmonic chant, about which there’s a nice interview with him here. I would highly recommend a rainy day listen of Hearing Solar Winds on good speakers, without doing much of anything else.

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Uchu – 1st, 1998 & Buddha, 1999

Guest post by Lolo Haha

Ooh boy yes. This record. These records. I’ve been jamming these albums for years, grinning whenever passing it onto folks, knowing I was passing along some transcendent holy grail to bring friends to the next level.

I downloaded this rip off of Mutant Sounds back in 2007 while depressed and studying abroad in Paris smoking entirely too much hash alone in my room and letting my hair grow out to the point where my host mother had our program supervisor sit me down and ask me if I was feeling depressed. I remember that the first night I listened to this was after I had my first experience buying hash from someone on the Seine River. French friends told me to just wait by the Seine and someone would come up and offer, so like a naive boy I waited at the river for 40 minutes until two guys walked up and asked ‘T’veux du shit?’ which basically means ‘u want sum weed?’ After I said yes one of the guys sat down next to me, looked all around, then took his left shoe off and put his hand in, pulling out a long, thin, lump of brown what? and showing it to me, asking for 20 euros. I had no idea what was going on but I handed him the 20 and then his friend came up and said ‘Fait-le payer trente!’ which was saying I should actually pay 30 for it. He backed away with the brown what? and my 20 euros demanding 10 more, which I readily and angrily supplied, sure I was getting duped and that it was bunk stuff I was buying. Turned out hash was good tho mmmmm

Dig in to this dynamic duo for a cosmic journey by Acid Mothers Temple members Higashi Hiroshi, Ayano, and Kawabata Makoto. 100 copies limited edition CDR. They proudly state on their website: “No synthesizer, no sampler, no programming, —– only guitars!!” so know you’re getting into some ‘legit’ vibes here. These Japanese psychedelia masterminds have shown me the way.

Black Devil – Disco Club, 1978

Black Devil’s Disco Club falls in the heavily mythologized, mysteriously resurrected music-of-nebulous-origin category, in the vein of Lewis or Charanjit Singh. Purportedly released in 1978 by Bernard Fevre under pseudonym “Junior Claristidge” (cool), Disco Club went completely unnoticed–was the world not ready for deep, dark, sublime disco hypnosis?–until Aphex Twin rereleased it on Rephlex Records in a series of 12″s in 2004, to the sound of critics tripping over themselves to make sweeping statements about this being one of the most important electronic records ever released, et cetera. The music was so ahead of its time both in structure and in production that many cried foul, suspecting an Aphex-Twin style hoax. Fairly so: I’m still skeptical of the release date every time I hear it. It’s too tasty, too prescient and too perfect.

All six of these tracks are similar in length and feeling, differing in a few BPM, shifting drum patterns, and vocal lines–but several of them move seamlessly between each other, making this a half hour disco meditation track rather than an album. You can hear “The Chase”-era Moroder all over this thing, but this is (dare I say it) less cheesy, slicker, and with a contagious, restless percussive spinal chord stretching throughout. So much dark Italo-style disco is trampled by heinous vocals, and gleefully so, but Disco Club‘s vocal treatment is restrained, effectively lyricless, and often totally absent, excepting a mantric chorus of skittering “dee-dee-doo-doo”s. Everything is exactly where it should be, fleshed out in high-resolution with heart-racing textures, laser-sharp synth pads, and thrilling percussive ornamentation. There’s a huge, dark, beastly thing throbbing just beneath the surface that never quite rears its head. The tension is there, simmering, and in hopes of exorcising it all you can do is hit repeat again and again.

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