by Robert Phoenix
Mickey Hart has always had one foot in the realm of deeply shamanic music. His percussive soundtrack work for Apocalypse Now with The Rhythm Devils was groundbreaking. He went onto work with a number of musicians on the world music scene, from Kitaro to Olatunji, to Zakir Husaain, to Airto. His Diga Rhythm Band release in 1976 was a groundbreaking fusion of East/West rhythms. You can also add leading the worlds largest drum circle at Earthdance, 2004 to Hart’s long and impressive (hey I was there!) resume.
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by Robert Phoenix
It’s not often that my pal, Stephen Kent raves about another didge player, but he has nothing but high praise for a ground breaking didge player from Checkoslovakia, named, “Ondrejem Smeykalem.” Smeykalem takes the diidge, new and avant-garde directions, while tapping into immense power of trance. Here is a Japanese video from “The Shinjuku Jam” on Youtube, showcasing his prodigious skills on the didge. See Shinjuku Jam on YouTube.com.

by Robert Phoenix
Another talent just flashed across my screen. In the tradition of Drew Dellinger, the poet who uses language to open new realms of consciousness, Dreaming Bear Baraka Kanaan and SpiritMoves, takes the energy of Hafiz and Rumi to the dance floor. Becoming a bonafide sensation, Dreaming Bear and his band are moving hearts, minds and bodies across the country in autonomous utopias like new age soaked Marin County and Maui. Here is a brief snippet of him at The Maui Arts Cultural Center.

by Robert Phoenix
I recently spent some time with Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz, the sacred/world music power couple. Sussan has just released five new discs on her own label through Big Fish Media, and are available at most digital music stores. A friend of mine just saw a clip of Sussan performing with The Polish National Symphony and she was mesmerized.

Sussan might be one of the dramatic, female vocalists on the planet and Richard is a master musician when it comes to playing the duduk, ney, flute and other woodwinds. There are rumors swirling that Sussan is putting together a new band with a LA based percussionist that is near and dear to our hearts.

Click the image for a brief sample of the brilliance of Sussan’s voice, from the video, “Snow White.”

by Robert Phoenix
I have known Kenji Williams for a decade now and I have seen go from a hungry student film maker and burgeoning music maker to one of the worlds most cutting edge artists, combining stunning visuals, with gorgeous soundscapes and otherworldly concepts. Williams studied film in Canada and came of age during the rise of the electronic music scene and dance culture. Trained as a violinist, Williams has worked assiduously to put it all together, merging his virtuoso on violin, with programmed beats and samples, with his love for imagery and telling a story.
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by Robert Phoenix
Back in the early nineties I got turned onto industrial music when I got a sales gig at Silent Records. I used to call up mom and pop record shops and try to sell them dark and eerie sounds of deviant rituals or some guy literally wanking off with a sampler. But it was all created, mostly artificial, noise. I recently ran across the Sounds of Saturn, recorded by The Cassini Satellite on youtube. It makes the music of The Hafler Trio, PGR and Throbbing Gristle seem tame in comparison. Check it out.

youtube.com

by Robert Phoenix
We often forget that our words have rhythm, tone, meaning and music, inherent in them; how we build them, string them, sing them, say them and pray them.

The voice of the poet is a lost art, often drowned out by the noise of the You Tube media marketplace and yet, on You Tube is where we discover the voice of poet/sage, Drew Dellinger as he gazes straight into the lens of our souls, reciting his lovely and profound, “Hymn To The Sacred Body Of The Universe.”

by Robert Phoenix
It’s been a while since I shipped some words over to Kosmic for this Music Blog, but that’s what happens when you decide to look at the election through starry eyes. My blog focused on the astrological connections between the candidates and the economy. There has never been more to write about from an astrological perspective, so I’ve just been using whatever spare time I can to to stay current. Now that the election has subsided, I can get back to a little music.

When I first started this, Chris (our Editor in Spirit) wanted me to do something on the hang drum. We had both experienced it together for the very first time in a cave concert up in the hills above Sausalito in Northern California.
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Since my last post was about me and I got that out of the way, I want to start talking about some other people. The first is “Akasa.” a woman I met the other night, the night of the new moon and the day of The Dragon Sun, an auspicious alignment. She’s a former businesswoman who had a spiritual transformation when she visited The Oracle at Delphi, something akin to a beam of sound entering her spirit and informing her of her next phase, which was to become a sound healer. This was back in 1997 and since then, she has gone on to build formal connections with the likes of Barbara Marx Hubbard, Rowena Patee-Kryder and the Belgian integral philosopher, Michael Bauwens.

She held a workshop/ritual in Mill Valley and I arrived on the latish side. When I stepped into the space of the mostly filled, medium sized room they were deep in the heart of some Chinese mudra associated with Tian Gong, a mystical version of Chi Gong and I’m sure a slightly less threatening version of the politically heretical Falun Gong. Akasa was dressed in ceremonial headdress and robes, toning, intoning and chanting while one of her students led the group through a guided meditation.
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It’s been a while since I’ve sent something Kosmic’s way, but there is a very good reason. I’ve been down in the lab making my own music. I alluded to this in an earlier post, but now I have living, breathing, pulsin and beating documents that live on my Myspace page.

I loaded my latest track last Friday and I have close to 200 plays already. What makes this track somewhat unique was that I was really driven to get it done and up on Myspace by last Friday night. I knew it was the full moon, but was unaware that the youtube guru, Siva Baba had declared last Friday’s full moon, “The Full Moon Of The Guru.” Based on his calculations, last week’s full moon was the beginning of the new age–the full moon of divine and loving grace.
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My good friend Stephen Kent, one of the worlds best non-aboroginal didgeridoo players just turned fifty. It seems like just yesterday when we met in 1993, some fifteen-years-ago when we teamed up for a booth selling CDs at a folk fair up in Davis. I was deep into my leather phase then, sporting a Euro-leather, motorcycle jacket, black stovepipes and black boots. Meanwhile, Stephen had the Gandalf look in full effect, with tresses flowing well past his shoulders. Needless to say, we made for an interesting contrast that day.

Fifteen years later, he is still blasting away on the didge and he might not have the same cultural cache of Ganga Giri (a former student of his) and Xavier Rudd, both of whom feast upon the jam band and trance groove circuit, he is making waves with the reunion show of Trance Mission and a brand new release.
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What makes Thievery Corporation so great and even remotely important? It is a question that I will have answered sometime before midnight tonight as I plan to climb into the Berkeley Hills and settle down for a hot solstice night of grooving beneath the stars at the Greek Theater where Thievery, Bebel Gilberto and Los Amigos Invisibles will bust out a musical polyglot of world fusion.

Thievery, are an interesting bunch. I actually signed them to their first digital music deal when I was at emusic. Their label, Eighteenth Street Lounge was just taking off with the first full lengths by TC as well as releases by Thunderball and Ursula 1000.
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Top Ten Downtempo CDs

OK list lovers, it’s time once again for a musical top ten that will surely add to your informational enlightenment quotient, also known as your “IEQ,” data that you can use to fuel your spiritual journey and achieve new heights of awareness and self-actualization.

Without further ado, let us look at my spiritually infused, top ten downtempo records of all time.

10. No Noise–Chakra Lounge Vol. 1 (Blue Flame Records)
I could never figure out why this record wasn’t more popular. It has everything you’d want in a cool, globally hip, slightly danceable release. Perhaps a major distributor in the U.S. and a scantily clad woman on an exotic beach somewhere the cover might have helped the cause.
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There are about half-a-dozen records from my early teens that I would consider defining recordings and listening experiences, which would shape my tastes for years to come. One of those records was No Mystery by Return To Forever. I was exposed to the album when I was walking through my high school campus and walked past a group kids listening to the local soul and R&B station, KSOL. They were playing this outrageously funky track, which immediately grabbed me and held me in that spot until the baritone back announce told us that it was “Jungle Waterfall” by Return To Forever. The track and the band name was etched into my brain and on my next outing to the record store, I sought it out. When I got home I played “Jungle Waterfall” over and over again. But eventually I migrated to the outer fringes of the grooves where I experienced the fractal dissonance of jazz for the first time as Chick Corea deconstructed piano melodies while Stanley Clarke, Lenny White and Al Di Meola furiously buzzed around Corea’s manic keyboard runs. That record lit my fuse for fusion and set me out on a quest to find more of the rock/jazz hybrid sound.
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Straddling the cultural intersection of Paul Simon’s groundbreaking Graceland project and the expansive vision of One Giant Leap, The Laya Project might rapidly rise in relevance to be included in the same discussion as both.The idea behind The Laya Project was to embark on a journey into deep culture, recording the indigenous music of the people of the Sub-Asian continents, such as Indonesia, Malaysia. India, Thailand, Myanmar, The Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Once the recordings had taken place, executive producer, Sastry Karra and his crew retreated to their studios in India where they sensitively fused beats and grooves together with the exotic rhythms and melodies they had captured. The result is a stunning collaboration that manages to maintain the richness and dignity of the local musical expression while expanding it outward, taking it into new musical and cultural territories.
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Lists seem to be really popular. I’ve been over to Yahoos music blogs and many of the most popular columns are list driven. So in the spirit of a listing world, I am going to contribute yet another list that will make your world, somehow more complete. Every list on my list will take into account all of the pre-requisites of body/mind/spiritology and I’ll list all pertinent ingredients as a result. That said, here is list number one.

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I was just in Los Angeles spending time with Greg Ellis and Lisbeth Scott of biomusique, discussing the inner life of their new release on Kosmic, The Ten Thousand Steps when they revealed to me that they will also be re-forming the groundbreaking trance outfit, Medicine Drum, along with founding member, Chris Decker. The new Medicine Drum will make its debut closing out The Harmony Festival, in Santa Rosa on the weekend of the 6th, 7th and 8th of June.
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What would happen if we could change the scale of music ever-so-slightly so that it would be more harmonically in tune with the rhythms and cycles of nature? This is a question that Hollywood composer and sound effects master, Alan Howarth asked himself and the results were surprising to say the least.

Howarth has cut his musical chops whipping up assorted bleeps, blasts and bangs for a number of major motion pictures. From Star Trek to Indiana Jones to dozens of Si-fi scores, you’ve probably heard his craft in action. But finding the source of all natural frequencies and rhythms became his true grail quest.
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The modern mantra is “green.” Or so it seems to be on the lips of many as we stare down looming eco-crisis and potential shortage of resources. It’s no wonder that the concept of green, or natural states permeates music as well.

I just got a copy of The 10, 000 Steps by Biomusique, the latest musical offering from Kosmic. On first listen, it’s fairly apparent that the concept of organic sounds is deeply embedded in the musical DNA of this project. It’s wide open, with space to breath and roam around in some of the ways that the best ambient music provides. It has strains of Enya, Dead Can Dance and David Sylvain, plucking the best elements out of all them.
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by Robert Phoenix
One of the great transitions that we as a culture are in the midst of is the shift from consumer culture to creative culture. This shift is being powered and driven by large due to affordable technologies that have been developed so that people can have access to tools that at one time would have cost somewhere in the thousands of dollars to access and learn. No greater example can be found than in the realm of music.
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Last week I got one of those group emails that came from some super list that was somehow affiliated with some larger subset of Yahoo groups that were loosely defined by a rather broad spiritual affiliation. You know those emails — put out by some well intended, but annoying stranger.

The person who sent it was incredibly excited and passionate. It was about a healing chant for Tibet and The Dalai lama and in fact even slightly suggested that it was The Dalai Lama himself doing the chanting. It was made very clear that no one was to profit off of these recordings and that now, more than ever, people needed to start playing this recording and chanting for the betterment of Tibet. Since I’ve been making my own music lately, I thought that using a sample of The Dalai Lama would be really great and since no one is buying my music, there would be no karmic repercussions in store for me. So I filed it away to perhaps download and use at some other point in time.
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Last night I was out with a friend and she had asked me, “whatever happened to Loop Guru?”

I went back in time to when I first heard the brilliant “Under Influence” when it was still a dance single.

Over twelve years ago, I was in the midst of Marin County’s tie-dyed dervish and twirling tantrika set at the Civic Center, listening to audio exotica spun by Cheb-I-Sabbah. Cheb had just been bringing records by Trans-Global Underground and Loop Guru back from Europe. Hearing Loop Guru for the first time was kind of like hearing the Sex Pistols, only while The Pistols gave voice to my feelings of alienation and angst, Loop Guru channeled my passion for fusion of culture, sound and spirit — a polyglot of possibility come to life.
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Inside the gilded walls of Club GOA, an exotic enclave where Rumi meets Kabir in the nape of Hollywood, the ethno-trance project, NAID came alive. It’s also where Kosmic Music officially launched the project with a release party.
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I’ve been thinking recently about the miniaturization of music and sound. For instance, at one point in time, to create a significant piece of music scores of instruments were needed to be involved — strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion. With the onset of the baroque period, the birth of the orchestra took place. It swelled to titanic proportions and ultimately peeked during the early part of the 20th century. Not only were the orchestras big, but the pieces were even bigger, statements, entire cosmologies, human dramas and epochs set to music.
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The latest wave of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has a special connotation for me that I’ll get to by the end of this post, but first let’s look at who is going to be enshrined in the Valhalla of Rock: This year, the honors fall to surf rock legends, The Ventures, Mersey Beat hit makers, The Dave Clark Five and the big three, Leonard Cohen, John Cougar Mellencamp and Madonna, or as I call them, The Poet, The Populist and The Priestess.
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