by Robert Phoenix
I recently caught up with Ashana, a Kosmic music artist and we chatted for nearly an hour over the phone. From her inspirational space in Santa Fe, we touched on a number of topics ranging from having a spiritual practice as part of her music and vice versa, the ongoing quest to open up to deeper levels of all love and trust and refining her vocal skills based on the classically trained methods she had apprenticed to when she first started singing.
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Kosmic’s mission to offer music to help improve your mental, spiritual and physical well-being naturally includes an interest and respect for Mother Earth and nature. April 22 will be the 40th observance of Earth Day, now held annually in over 175 countries! The first Earth Day, in 1970, is considered to be the beginning of the modern environmental movement. We encourage you to participate in events in your area (in the US, go to: epa.gov/earthday).

To inspire you to do your part for a greener and cleaner world, and in honor of Earth Day, Kosmic Music is offering a variety of nature-oriented titles at an Earth Day discount for inspiration, meditation or just plain relaxation.
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UK-based label Sona Rupa is known for its collection of Indian classical and contemporary music and its music for relaxation, meditation and yoga. Their albums are new renderings of age-old bhajans, modern spiritual compositions, kirtans, sacred mantras, and other works inspired by prayers, writings, and contemporary and classical chants. All are performed by well-known, well-respected and popular contemporary Indian musicians. The label was founded by an ex-pat from the Indian state of Gujarat to serve the needs of those Gujaratis living in distant lands, far away from their spiritual homeland. Over the years the label has evolved into producing music that pleases the soul. Twenty six of their albums are now available at kosmicmusic.com. Here are a couple of them:

by Robert Phoenix
One of the best musicians you’ve probably never heard of is Layne Redmond. To those in the know, she is nothing short of a marvel. A world class percussionist, she was named one of the most influential drummers of the nineties, by Drum Magazine. There she was, the lone woman amongst 53 heavyweights like Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Zakir Hussain and Mickey Hart, being recognized for her mastery of the frame drum, tambourine and other, more exotic forms of hand percussion.

In addition to being a kick-ass drummer, she’s also a master teacher, sharing her love and knowledge of rhythm with the world at large. And…adding another layer, she’s also a music healer, a seasoned practitioner of music (more…)

The late, great Carlos Gardel is revered as the foremost star and true giant of Argentina’s beloved tango genre, with an astonishing 1,000+ recordings and 800 recorded songs to his credit. Sixty-eight years after his untimely death in a plane crash at only 37 years of age, and at the height of his monumental national popularity, a devoted following of fans continues to keep his legend alive as a tragically lost musical hero in both Argentinean and Uruguayan cultural history.

Gardel Martini is a collection of ten of Gardel’s most beloved signature songs. It is also a collective of young Argentinean musicians — all now based in Los Angeles — who worked together to freshly re-interpret some of this classic repertoire for a generation of new audiences, adding a distinctive bossa nova, “lounge music” flare to their renditions of the songs.
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Biomusique is the extraordinary collaboration of singer/songwriter Lisbeth Scott and multi-instrumentalist Greg Ellis, who created their new album, THE 10,000 STEPS, over three months of intense, totally acoustic recording. Scott’s striking, ethereal vocals are framed by Ellis’ subtle signature percussion — Balinese gongs, African udu, Tibetan bowls, Indian tabla & nagara, Middle Eastern frame drums – as well as bass, piano, guitar, dulcimer and a striking use of trumpet.

Trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, Lisbeth Scott is an extraordinary singer and composer whose work is ubiquitous in numerous major motion pictures; her work has appeared in Spielberg’s Munich (for which composer John Williams wrote a piece expressly for her voice), The Chronicles of Narnia, Shrek, and The Passion of the Christ. She has worked with INXS, John Prine, Mark Isham, John Martyn, and Tom Rush, and produced four critically-acclaimed solo albums, including Dove, which was named Record of the Year by New Age Voice and reached #2 on the New Age music charts.
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I’ve re-discovered vinyl. You remember don’t you? Wax? Those plastic platters with circular grooves spinning out the soundtracks of lives…yes, that’s it…records. Well in my attempt to merge the archaic with the temporal, I decided to start ripping my records onto my computer and into MP3s and when I dove back into my record collection I found a surplus of material that had set the stage for today’s global renaissance in sacred and spiritual music, the likes of which Deva Premal and Jai Uttal are making to the delight of many.

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by Robert Phoenix
The latest round of The Grammies had its fair share of surprises. From Amy Winehouse’s big wins and her bloozy rendition of “Rehab” (captured live from London) to Herbie Hancock’s startling win for best album. In fact, Hancock’s capture of the best album award for River: The Joni Letters A tribute to the music of Joni Mitchell, was rapidly regarded of one of the biggest upsets in Grammy history. On the surface it’s easy to see why. It’s a jazz record and most people outside of a rapidly aging few don’t purchase jazz CD’s. It’s slowly but surely joining Western movies, drive-ins, and other forms of Americana that comprise our history but aren’t immediately accessible as modern idioms of expression. That’s no slight on jazz, where some of the greatest and most creative souls congregate, it’s just that as a musical and commercial force, it’s a genre that exists mostly for collectors, purists and lovers of that soft new-agey version of the Quiet Storm listening experience. So how did one of Miles’ guys run away with the best record of the year?
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by Robert Phoenix
Enzo Buono and Martin Landquist were brought together by music. In the most esoteric sense it’s the story of two notes being sounded, heard and recognized, vibrating in sympathy with one another. In it’s most mundane interpretation it’s two men who deeply resonated with the work each of them were doing and as a result immersed themselves in the realm of sacred chants deep in the heart of mother India. The two of them form the neural network of The NAID (pronounced “Noid”) Project and their first release on Kosmic Music, Varanasi. The two of them employed the divine voices of Dakshinamurthy recording their vocals and weaving them into their world-class mix of ambient grooves and simmering house beats. I caught up with Enzo via the magic of email and asked him a few questions about how NAID came about and where it might be going.

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by Robert Phoenix
Tony, Tony, Tone! Self-help guru Anthony Robbins has added another title to his list of change-agent credentials — that of music producer. Well, in actuality, it’s really co-producer as he and his wife Sage had an active role in choosing both the music and the musicians on Sacred Blessings, their contribution to the world of yoga and meditation soundtracks. It’s a sort of compilation, sort of original production with tracks licensed from White Swan and Kosmic Music and some original material actually produced by Sage Robbins. It features some of the finest musicians on the sacred music scene including Maneesh De Moor. Deva Premal, Miten, Ben Leinbach and others.

But the question must be asked: Is it any good? The answer is “yes” mostly due in part to the inclusion of the fine talents of De Moor, Premal and the rest. In fact, Premal sounds astoundingly good on the deeply meditative “Invocation.”

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by Robert Phoenix
Being a mother, mystic and musician is no easy feat. Just ask Eda Maxym, founder and front woman for the world music, sacred groove, rock outfit, The Imagination Club. “As any parent knows,” begins Maxym, “especially if they are involved in any creative endeavor that demands some time to oneself to enter into the deeper spaces of inspiration in order to be able to listen to the ‘Muse’ balancing the time and energy demands of parenting with my writing and performing music has been very challenging.”

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by Robert Phoenix
In 2005, Maneesh De Moor and Bahramji created the now classic, Call Of The Mystic on Blue Flame Records. A recording that has enough sacred essence to take a yoga class deeper and deeper into the heart of the asanas as well as provide the spiritual atmosphere and ambient groove to any environment needing a bit of a relaxed, yet heady chill, it was the perfect meeting ground between producer and prophet. The union of De Moor and Baharmji on the recording was an exercise in divine opposites, fully complimenting one another. Since then, both men have gone onto other projects and seemingly abandoned what looked to be a very promising collaboration.

To understand their inherent differences, you have to understand them both.

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by Robert Phoenix
In my personal quest to find the sound of enlightenment, I spent the weekend of the 26th of January at the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills, attending the Sound Healing conference, organized by the Global Sound Healing Institute, based out of San Francisco and directed by David Gibson, a music engineer and sound healer himself. Gibson tread the fine line between dialed in organizer and an eccentric minister of sound, slipping in and out of trance-states during his keynote and panel appearances, blurring the line between the objective and the subjective, dissolving for moments into non-time, courting attention with OMs and overtones.

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by Robert Phoenix
Just when I thought I had heard everything, my good friend, Chris Van Buren sends me a stack of CDs from Kosmic Music. Before I get into what I heard when I listened, you have to understand that while I have an adventurous ear, I’m also slightly jaded. I spent the early part of the nineties wallowing in the murky realms of industrial music and dark, ethno ambience. From there, I moved onto the new ambient renaissance that was taking root in San Francisco at a weekly event called, “The Gardening Party” that was held once a week in a club that used to house the Doobie Brothers tour plane. With the advent of the 24-bit sampler it seemed as though anything was possible. That’s when fusion — not in the classic Bitches Brew sense, but the William Orbit, Deep Forest, Enigma and B-Tribe sense, fusing seductive global grooves and smoothed out house and hip hop beats — became the progeny of cultural collusion; east and west wet kissing together on the dance floor, wrapped in one great global hug. Pygmy tribes trilled ambient lullabies and Gregorian chant became top forty-fodder. It seemed like singularity and the crest of a new wave couldn’t be far behind.
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