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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It seems like the past three years, I’ve been covering music that’s spiritual or has elements in it that resonate with spiritual reverberations. I’ve done this mostly in the new age space, but have long since abandoned any true connection with what is now most surely an anachronistic and even quaint label. Now the field is wide open, like the aperture set to wide, letting the totality of the light in, no longer stopping it down in catchable frames of reference. I can find it almost everywhere if I can attune my inner ear to the possibility of it’s existence and while I’m still working out the metaphysics of Paris Hilton’s singing career, I am hearing and sensing a broader spectrum of information infusing itself in bands like the ethereal prog-rockers from Iceland, Sigur Ros, to the scorching afro-punk, spoken word screeds of Saul Williams.

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Yes, it’s that time again, where fifty-million of us stay glued to the TV for two nights a week for the next three months as a cast of karaoke singers serenade us in an upwardly vertical direction—it’s time for American Idol.

This season has the requisite blend of rockers and crooners, fly girls and teen angels, but what really stands out is how the youth of the show are really flexing their vocal chops and stage presence in extremely mature and worldly way. Teen singers, David Archuleta, Alaina Whitaker, Alexandrea Lushington, Asia’h Epperson and Danny Noriega display skills and presence well beyond their limited experience, though Archuleta did win Star Search when he was even younger. From a spiritual standpoint, these kids appear to be remarkably balanced, poised and grounded in their talent. In fact, Epperson’s father passed away just days before her audition. She appears undaunted by this life-changing event and claims to feel her father’s presence nearby as she performs. While I won’t go as far to say that American Idol is becoming a showcase for Indigo Children, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that these are some old souls rocking the planetary stage.

It’s enough to keep me watching and admiring the talent and poise of tomorrow’s bright lights, today.

by Robert Phoenix
Robert Phoenix moves freely among a vast array of realities, but tends to focus-in on music and human evolution.