One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

– Bob Marley

After all the heavy things i have been writing lately, i guess its time to have some joyful noise ;  )

My headphones

They saved, saved my life

– Björk

Yep, many times over, my headphones (and what was coming thru them : ) were saving me.

I just checked, i have 3100 albums on my computer in iTunes, 31900 songs.

Am i crazy???

Probably.

But i am not the hoarder type, far from it!

Those albums are all deliberately chosen over time, over the time of my adult life.

Actually they are very much reflecting on my life and the evolution of my tastes.

~~~

Back in the late 1960s / early 70s when i was growing to be myself, i found myself in the middle of a astonishing explosion of musical experimentation and innovation.

Every week appeared – out of seemingly nowhere – a number of singer-songwriters and groups/bands who made the most astonishing sounds and music, never heard before.

Did not know why (cosmic energy i guess ;  ) but never cared to know.

I was pretty much enchanted and occupied to drink it all in. The creativity, the freedom, the messages.

You could see me for hours on end sitting or laying around with my bulky headphones on and my Phillips 18inch reel tape machine playing from beginning to the end.

I could care less about the world and my headphones definitely saved my life from the boring world out there :  )

And i very much believed that some of the music i listened to would become classics, something like Mozart or Beethoven or something.

But  – of course, most of it faded away into memory lane and 50 years on, now only a few die-hard old hippies and fans remember them at all. 

(I suggest to use headphones or a good audio system to enjoy the music)

Life, as always, marches on, and with it the musical tastes and trends.

Also me, i moved on and learned to play the guitar well enough to be able to “channel” Leonard Cohen, my all-time favorite poet & songwriter (to this day).

The guy also conveniently fitted my – somewhat limited vocal range.

And I tried myself on a few songs of my own making.

(did not manage to become as famous as Leonard ;  )

But again life moved on and i got into meditation, seriously and into “spiritual” and devotional music.

I am jumping ahead in big steps – time-wise …

Some serious Jazz and Classical music entered my world of course,  Mozart & John Coltrane, Satie and Keith Jarrett,  Jan Garbarek and Chopin, just to name a few examples.

And to make the story not too long … I really started to appreciate some of the contemporary Avant-garde composers, like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and groups like early Tangerine Dream, Cluster and such.

Synthesizer and electronic music pioneers like Delia Derbyshire,  Laurie Spiegel, Eliane Radigue and Suzanne Ciani, all women who did amazing experimental music with very rudimentary instrumentation.

Check them out if you are interested.

With this background i became more and more interested in Ambient Music, music and sounds that are meant to be in the background like a painting on the wall or like an architectural environment.

Meant to set a mood, a tone, a brainwave frequency …

This kind of sound-music often is very long, very slow and evolving over time. To really “get it” and benefit from its effect on the subconscious, one needs to lay down, have a good sound system or headphones.
Its ok to drift off or fall asleep …

Here some pieces of famous examples:

This one is 10 hours long (no kidding :  )

I became more and more interested to listen to and also research pure sounds as they are used in Eastern spiritual traditions, listen to field recordings of pure nature sounds and also to sound frequencies that are used to induce certain higher brainwave patterns.

Here some examples:

Coming back to a more “musical” kind of music i am discovering composers of  contemporary sacral music, of neo-classical composers, minimalist & “slow” music and some very interesting younger composers who fuse the classical and the new into one … music.

I am pretty excited about that. Also because a lot of that new music is using piano as main instrument.

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