Not being one who meditates, it is rather presumptuous for me to write a piece for meditation, so I wrote what I think I would want were I to do so. I felt that a drone would be the best way to go, so that was used as the underlying idea. A bell is to be played a minute in and a minute away from the end, so I divided the piece into eleven one minute segments with the bell denoting each minute’s dividing point.
The drone is grounded on a c minor chord where every minute through the sixth a small amount of complexity is added, with the complexity progressively removed as the minutes move past the halfway point. Music For Meditation is eleven minutes in length, but can be looped to offer any multiple of the eleven minutes
Music For Meditation was written for Tubular Bell, Violas, Cellos, and String Bass.
you know what junto means in spanish and portuguese?
Actually, the issue is that, when there’s a “collaborative challenge” some people can’t stop collaborating and produce multiple tracks.
I’m not referring to anybody in particular, specially not me…
Seriously, I don’t think there’s ever been any ‘solitude’ policy.
actually not even a ‘monogamy’ rule here (we had a threesome week not long ago)
10 minutes of droning for your meditation pleasure! I alternated among several tones with phasing effects to encourage slow breathing, and added a few ornamental tones along the way. Most instruments are from the Z3TA+2 collection. I have to say I really enjoyed creating this. I am very relaxed now.
This was my very 1st Junto & I really enjoyed it. The idea of the bell chiming exactly a minute from the beginning & prior to the end got me thinking about palindromes. I decided to base the structure of my piece on a palindrome, reversing it at the halfway mark.
I began with a field recording, taken by placing my phone on the windowsill, by an open window in my music room. This captured some rain sounds, some bird noises & cars on the street outside. I then recorded a couple of passes of my wife’s Tibetan singing bowl, fading these in & processing them in Logic.
I then built up some drones, making these sympathetic harmonically to the singing bowl.
The ending is backwards, which I figured could symbolise an altered reality when emerging from the meditative state.
I wanted to create something without being influenced by how others have approached this project, so I’m now totally looking forward to listening to the other submissions
“Write a poem imagining your conception,” recommends Andrei Codrescu in an essay titled Exercises for Poets. “Use the breath measures that might have been those of your conceivers … [then] write a poem about your birth. The poem itself should be concerned mainly with the journey from the moist darkness of the womb through the birth canal into the light of the world.”
Suss Müsik declines to envision such grotesque imagery, thank you very much. That being said, effective meditation is understood to be something like returning to a womblike state. One concentrates solely on breathing in order to achieve a deep form of relaxation, helping to clear the mind from the cognitive detritus that collects day-to-day.
For this lengthy piece, Suss Müsik began with a simple organ riff that was played through a Moog MF-102 ring modulator. The sound of breathing was sampled and distressed to match the timbre of metallic percussion. You might hear voices and flutes in there as well. A chime enters at the 1-minute mark and repeats just before the final ascension back to consciousness.
The piece is titled Lůno, named after the Czech word for “womb” and dedicated to little Zachary Isaac (who was born this week to good friends of Suss Müsik). The image is magnified cotton.
Layer 1: Bell sample.
Layer 2: Gong sample.
Layer 3: A very slowed-down field recording of wind through reeds.
Layer 4: Field recording of Bells Rapids [Western Australia] in winter.
Layer 5: Layer 3 turned into MIDI and played using Greatly Rewarding instrument from Ableton.
Just got home from a cross country ski trip in the woods with my girlfriend, so this felt very appropriate.
Voices by STO, 0-coast, Tonestar and Rings…
Hello.
Hybrid Eb minor/major nine minutes meditational soundscape.
Drone performed on my Harmonium from New Delhi, using all 3 possible stops and a “drone”.(4 tracks)
Live Hang improvisation recorded with two microphones in Paris.
Upright bass (bowed ) softly a root note all along.
Track dedicated to Ganesh, inspired on this mantra: Om Gam Ganapataye namaha
An old clock guests chiming at 3’30.
The bell (1 minute marks) is from Toledo, Spain, circa 1972.
The little I know about the zen form of mediation is that it exists in a place that isn’t really about concentration and thinking at all, but more in the areas of neutral observation and acceptance. And that music might actually provide too much focus. So I’ve gone for some form of slow polyrhythmic chimey kind of effort with a background drone.
Instrumentation is various eurorack modules and some added field recordings; I’m sending some of the eurorack through the Nearness panned mixer which was developed in part on a thread on the Lines community.
First time posting in here, hope I did it right. Been a long while since I contribute any track to the community. Good to be back in 2018. Added my field recordings which was done via Zoom Recorder and Soundman OKM binaural ear mic .
Started off with rainy nights and end it with nature reserve sounds. Best to listen this piece with headphones / earphones as I used binaural mic to record them, hence the 3D like sound of the field recordings. Been exploring the parameters in Logic Pro Alchemy synth, so layering all the textures, tones and pads to create this meditative piece, which is mainly inspired my restful stay in a house at Bromma (Stockholm) last year. Hope y’all find some sort of inner zen meditating to this piece…
Eight minutes of meditation music. Sounds in order of appearance:
A synth patch that Francis Preve helpfully made for me as a way of explaining how the synth in “Rez” by Underworld works. I added some Max For Live LFO randomization.
My two-year-old daughter improvising vocals through Auto-Tune, which, as it turns out, she loves doing.
A Wavetable preset called Endomorph.
The opening two bars of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, slowed down and lowered in pitch by an enormous amount.
A sample of “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus, also slowed down a lot.
Berimbau sampled from “Africadeus” by Nana Vasconcelos.
Gamelan sampled from I forget where.
A bell I recorded with my phone in a sculpture garden in Long Island.
my partner and I made this collab-o yesterday morning, and then meditated to it.
We just used Ableton presets, making a couple of slightly out of phase loops, then added some very slow parameter automation. The idea being that you go on a journey, where nothing perceptibly is changing.
The bells at the one, and 16 minutes mark, might have got lost a bit - because there are bells throughout the entire track.
i had an idea of what i wanted to do - i was gonna do some harsh noise interspersed with gongs. the idea being that the music is not imbued with peace but rather that peace is a byproduct of being present where you are.
of course, there’s still the intent of making meditation music : indirectly influenced by the new agey nicey nicey bollox i was trying to avoid.
fortunately i forgot about all this. i went to the buddhist centre for a meditate and then had to rush to some work. later i was making some music (classical instruments in iris 2) feeling peaceful and present but also with an undercurrent of unaccepted stress and anxiety. an important insight from meditation is how complex my inner emotional landscape can be.
once i realized this was appropriate for the junto, i stretched the track to 7 minutes and recorded my meditation bowl (there happened to be a penny in there which made a nice buzz)
i can hear my sense of peace in the track but also the dissonance and distortion
