ID Music 2021 Year in Review
Part I: Trve and False Meditation Musics
The Inter-Dimensional Music 2021 Year in Review aired in three installments on WQRT Indianapolis, Marfa Public Radio, and LOOKOUT FM in Los Angeles. Find the setlist to Part I below. We’ll post a new Mixcloud stream with each update to our 2021 Year in Review.
HOWEVER! The complete cycle is now available in its entirety to newsletter readers – like you! thank you! – as a single three-hour 320kbps MP3 download.
One of the best parts of hosting a moderately unpopular yet widely distributed and surprisingly long-running experimental meditation community radio show is that I can play pretty much whatever I want. Inter-Dimensional Music aspires to be like the Grateful Dead: leaderless, committed to constant change, and always transmitting the bummers along with the beatitude. Also if you don't like the show, you probably REALLY don't like the show.
It feels indulgent compared to my turn-of-the-millennium career writing about music as a critic and journalist (for print publications!?). Now I only pay attention to what I’m interested in. I am also less compelled to evaluate and rank music according to some imaginary objective standard after having considered a statistically significant number of concurrent releases. All leading up to the inevitable early December1 release of an infinity of Album of The Year lists.
Lists are fun – and I insist that I am fun at parties, or at least I was in the before times when I went to parties – but lists reinforce the regressive idea that culture is a narrative rather than a landscape. That creating art is a competition with winners and losers. To be totally melodramatic, lists are a quietly toxic reinforcement of hierarchical worldview, and encourage the sort of binary thinking that is at the root of all suffering. As the Third Zen Patriarch wrote back in the 500s, "The Great Way is not difficult / for those who do not pick and choose."
Which brings us to the definitive Inter-Dimensional Music Top-Ranking Musics of 2021 list. Because lists are fun, it's a list. Because we try to resist hierarchical thinking and also because we have enough time on our hands to try and combine our interests in Zen, yoga, and heavy/mellow music, it's actually more of a confusing diagram based on principles laid out in the Tao Te Ching. These are the same principles at the core of ID Music’s weekly yin-yang flow:
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Yin and yang are inherently connected distinctions of darkness/light, coldness/heat, or sinking/rising. But they're not binaries, and they’re not static. A hot summer afternoon is yang compared to the yin coolness of an autumn morning. But the same autumn morning is the yang counterpart to the yin chill of the soon-coming autumn evening. A still August day in the Northern Hemisphere can be yin to the howling yang of a January blizzard. Each day only exists as an infinite number of quantum2 level interactions: There is no yin without yang, no day without night, no harsh noise without dulcet ambient, no death metal without life metal, no existence without connection.
The ID Music 2021 Review accounts for the rapid-fire yang tempos and downpressing yin tones found on such exquisitely morbid death metal as Malignant Altar's Realms of Exquisite Morbidity, as well as the yang vibes that frolic at lazy yin speed in Shivarasa's "Field of Love." It's a representation of how I assemble a weekly hour of music that moves from Ustalost’s putrescent black metal hysteria to Oui Ennui's sublime fermented ambience, or how selections from the forest rave label Astral Industries lead us in a circle to Mako Sica and Hamid Drake's meditative dirge for George Floyd.
The accompanying three hour ID Music session was mixed "live to tape" late at night at Cosmic Chambo Studio in beautiful downtown Muncie, Indiana. We’re 100% digital, and produced slop-style with Serato and Audition. We’ll post individual shows in the Mixcloud archive with the next two installments of this list. The complete cycle is now available in its entirety to newsletter readers – like you! thank you! – as a single three-hour 320kbps MP3 download. If lossless is your thing, DM me or hit my line for FLACs.
2021 in Trve Meditation Music
ID Music is a sincere experiment in meditation, although for me actual zazen, or sitting meditation, works best in silence. But the best soundtrack for contemplating the void is whatever happens to be vibrating through the void where you happen to be contemplating right now. And then there's also actual meditation music, created by people who seem familiar with sitting meditation practices.
The song I listened to the most in 2021 was Shivarasa's "Field of Love," mostly because it's the alarm sound on the phone I use as a meditation timer. Shivarasa bills herself as "one of the most powerful producer/DJs in Los Angeles," and describes her music as a "meditative bass experience." This 10m bliss-out fulfills expectations, sounding like something unearthed by vintage New Age tape archivist Sounds of the Dawn, but with bass-forward Bristolian production. And it’s just long enough for a couple sun salutations to wrap up 6:30am zazen.
The last two years have also yielded an abundance of self-identified meditation music from life metal lifers Growing and Sunn O))). Growing's recent output has been one of the most unexpected pleasures of these first two pandemic years. The full length Diptych got a lot of love, but after hours of heavy rotation I kept returning to the Humming Amps and Broken Strings series. And GAINER gets the most play of all, a truly sublime collaboration with longtime friend of the show Mary Lattimore.
Sunn continued to make exactly the kind of music I want them to make, and they continue to drive the point home with explicit references to Buddhist concepts. Their late 2021 live album recorded at the BBC extends the benevolent vibes of Life Metal and Pyroclasts with contributions from Anna Von Hausswolff. But more than anything else I listened to the unexpectedly satisfying Life Metal preproduction tapes: five hours of extended lovingkindness drone that appeared briefly on Bandcamp in 2020, only to disappear into the rainbow-hued fog after a week or so.
I’m enthusiastic about Sunn and Growing's entire catalogs, but it's immensely inspiring when veteran musicians are making the best sounds of their career 20 years in. I like New Growing and New Sunn even more than Old Growing and Old Sunn, for the same reasons I like New Dinosaur Jr. even more than Old Dinosaur Jr. There's a weathered confidence and grace to the music; it has lost some harsh edges while becoming heavier than anything that has come previously.
It's part of my bit as a yoga teacher and meditation person to complain about the overabundance of self-anointed healers and day-tripper shamans that have appropriated mindfulness teachings for a thriving self-improvement industry that often totally misses the point3 of those teachings. But every once in awhile I realize I've been overly critical of genuinely helpful music. Such is the case with Shivarasa, as well as Hathor's Rose Choir. The latter’s self-titled album on Golden Ratio Frequencies has a true big church sound created by "a participatory performance group composed of musicians, dancers, and storytellers embodying mystic traditions and practicing various therapeutic arts." This collection of four live recordings of the group's performances in actual IRL big churches, big mosques, and other big-sounding sacred spaces delivers on the promise made by the rose quartz cover art. It is the celestial yang to Anna Von Hausswolff’s subterranean yin chorales.
It is also my pleasure to point once again to Kimazui Chinmoku. This is the experimental ambient project from my friend and teacher Nick Terry, the organizer of the Marfa, Texas sangha that was so important to the revitalization of my Zen practice. Kimazui Chinmoku sounds like a product of Nick's intimate familiarity with the teachings of Joko Beck and Ezra Bayda, as well as his understanding of the open-hearted wisdom of Ian MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, Joe Lally, and Brendan Canty.
2021 in False Meditation Music
• Yin Tempos
• Yin <-> Yang Vibes
"At the end of our lives, we become completely yin," is one of my favorite lines from Sarah Powers, one of the yoga teachers that I was reading during my yin yoga teacher training. It's one of the ideas that informs my "death-affirmation yoga" mindfulness installations, and it's where the 2021 Inter-Dimensional Music Year in Review list actually begins.
The deepest and darkest yin-on-yin experience of 2021 came from Drown, an ambient music project from Markov Soroka, who is more widely known for Tchornobog, an extremely psychedelic blackened-death/doom-metal project that resulted from “heavy meditation in a desert landscape from the perspective of a vessel mountain which harbors a nest for the mind's eye to be imprisoned." That’s my kind of metal.
On first listen, I described Drown’s Утоплення album as "pulsating basslines and guitar drift to aid entheogenic contemplation of kelp forests and the lightless geographies further below. Approaches NARKOPOP levels of heavyweight ambience." Eight months later and it's still tied for second-best Gas record of 2021.
Metal people making ambient music often produces mixed results4. There is a world of difference between creating ambient music that stands on its own, and crafting the 1-3 minute ambient interludes5 that offer respite between frenzied squalls of black metal. Interstitial moments that most hesher blogs will just end up complaining about anyway. A lot of self-described “dark ambient” sounds like a collection of said interludes, assembled by well-meaning heads who nevertheless seem oblivious to the intensely leaden sounds that are still filed under plain old “ambient.” 2021 gave me several opportunities to reconsider such condescending opinions.
Having experienced Drown’s hypoxic reveries, we now ascend from the deep with the aid of Hoverkraft, the New Age guise of Blood Incantation’s Paul Riedl. Blood Incantation’s atmospheric death metal crossed over to relatively mainstream audiences with 2019’s The Hidden History of the Human Race, and their skill with ambient interludes makes even more sense when you see the Enya patch hidden among the gruesome badges on Riedl’s battle jacket.
Nevertheless, when Cosmic Chambo Studio VIP Collector’s Circle Member Kyle sent Hoverkraft my way, I took its “meditative analog synthscapes, calming piano & pastoral folk-ambient guitar instrumentals” as the rediscovery of a bona fide lost New Age classic. All of this bodes well for Blood Incanation’s forthcoming Timewave Zero. Due out at the end of February, the band has proclaimed that they’re “stripping away the Metal and emphasizing the Dark, Cinematic, and exceedingly Cosmic atmosphere our music is known for.”
Along with Growing and Sunn, Kevin Richard Martin’s pandemic-era output has been a reliable balm well-suited to the prolonged periods of social isolation that have marked my COVID experience. As anyone who talks with me for longer than five or 10 minutes will know, I’m a Type-1 diabetic, which means I’m at a significantly higher risk of serious complications, hospitalization, and death if I end up riding the ‘rona. And so while the world around me has slowly returned to previous levels of activity – and Indiana has earned the distinction of being the 51st (?!) least safe state during COVID-19 – people get mad at me for staying away from large indoor gatherings in accordance with the guidelines for immunocompromised people established by the CDC, my wife, and my endocrinologist.
KRM has continued a flawless run of albums that manage to deliver the nosebleed-inducing (in a good way!) bass of his work as The Bug and King Midas Sound via mostly beatless ambience. Last year saw no less than six (six!) volumes of Frequencies for Leaving Earth.
And for 2021 we have the “lush, warm, and eternal” deepwater dub, “aquatic gamelans, and liquified drone metallics” of Melting Point. It’s not quite the same deep yin water as Drown, but that’s mostly a matter of temperature, rather than tempo. Wolfgang Voight is once again a useful point of reference, as Melting Point ties with Soroka’s project for the second best GAS album of 2021.
Our unintentionally hydrologically-inclined survey of 2021’s most slow and low tempo’d musics ends with some of the most sublime ambient sounds that have graced our home soundsystem in quite some time. dj)))water))’s Bandcamp page offers little in the way of didactics, but their album titles, sculptural use of emojis, and surprise links to Ursula K. Le Guin novels suggests that we’re in good company.
Played on the proper soundsystem, these compositions do a thing that people who know more about chakras than I do would maybe describe as “chakra opening.” There’s a low-end that shakes something loose in the guts in a very pleasant way, is what I’m trying to say. “Maximum volume yields maximum results” applies across the full spectrum of auditory experience.
The Farthest Shore is my favorite of their 2021 releases, but at the end of this year’s New Year’s Eve medicine journey, me and my trip-sitter were making exceptions to the “absolutely no internet” rule to fill out our collection, so that I might come down more easily while fully immersed.
The title here is likely a reference to the third book in Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, and I like to think that both incidences point to the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra: Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
As Richard Hayes, an Emeritus professor of Buddhist philosophy at the University of New Mexico writes,
The whole mantra, literally translated, comes out a bit like this: "Oh awakening that has gone, gone, gone to the further shore, gone completely to the further shore. Amen."
More loosely translated, it means this: "You Brahmin priests with your fancy fire sacrifices aren't the only ones who get people to heaven. We can do it without killing animals and wasting trees. So there.”
BONUS: Timber Rattle
While we’re talking about fires, animals, and trees: I wrote at length about the meditative experience of Timber Rattle’s arboreal drones for Aquarium Drunkard in an essay that is also about my first encounters with Korean Zen.
The effect is both bucolic and gloomy, like forest-bathing in the dankness of a deep holler, catching a whiff of musk from a hidden den, or inhaling the scent of creosote under the heavy skies of a desert monsoon. The weight is undeniable, making Timber Rattle the rare band that can shift between the slow-burning radiance of Brightblack Morning Light’s ritualistic country-soul, and the mesmerizing crush of “tribal” metal that Neurosis initiated with Pain of Mind‘s “Takeahnase.”
Their 2021 album god walks the dark hills still slaps in a cryptical backcountry pre-lingual cleansing ritual sort of way.
Thank you for reading, listening, sharing the posts, commenting publicly, writing back privately, subscribing for free, subscribing for money, not subscribing at all but maybe bookmarking the site, and/or for just being here in an ambient sort of way. These connections are the reason I take the time to make these things!
😑
☸️✨🔊✨🖤
🙏🏻
DC
Next up:
The ID Music 2021 Year in Review continues with diagrams of the best things that I found while expanding my limited understanding of contemporary jazz; the things I listened to the most while updating my extremely outdated understanding of contemporary dance music; my favorite metal that is not metal; and my favorite music that is actually metal. Plus 2021’s top picks for slop-style DIY kitchen candling.
20211231 PROGRAM NOTES
Here at ID Music we've diagrammed a circular, non-hierarchical list of our favorite 2021 music on an interconnected yin/yang scale as applied to both atmosphere and tempo. For this week's session, please sink into a mostly uninterrupted flow of the year's coldest, darkest, most wet and heavy downpressing yin vibrations.
We'll hear language from the Tao Te Ching on the hollowness of both hope and fear throughout the program.
stream: Part I via Mixcloud
download: ID Music 2021 in Review 180m Megamix (320kbps)
ID Music 20211231 setlist
artist - work
GY!BE - OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.)
Ustalost - Bright Window Closing
Luke Stewart - Works For Upright Bass and Amplifier Pt IV (edit)
Mako Sica - Unraveling
Shackleton - Few Are Chosen
Krallice - Demonic Wealth
Aura Gaze - Cloud Temple (feat. Ariel Kalma)
Emeka Ogboh - Everydaywehustlin
Oui Ennui - IV
Azu Tiwaline - Until The End (Don't DJ Remix)
Dharma: Tao Te Ching
Inter-Dimensional Music is heard weekly on the airwaves of Marfa Public Radio on the West Coast of Texas, LOOKOUT FM across Los Angeles, and 99.1FM WQRT in Central Indiana
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It's dumb to post lists of the best music of 2021 in early December. This sort of made sense back when I worked in print magazines, when labels mailed promos out months ahead of the release, and it took weeks between final edits, sending the files to the printer, reviewing the blue lines, submitting final changes, and then waiting for the physical copies to ship to newsstands. It's not like that anymore, and the only reason the lists come out in early December is to help with Christmas shopping or something?
I've been keeping one of those general-audience theoretical physics books on the bedside table, as it helps with the usual "suddenly completely awake at 3:48am for no reason" experience. Rather than staring into the darkness thinking "what do the failures in my life actually even mean?" I'm staring at a dimly lit ereader and thinking "what actually is heat, even?”
“Also no attainment, with nothing to attain” is my favorite line from the Heart Sutra. Therapy, self-help strategies, head meds, etc are often about fixing problems. I’ve benefitted from all of these things! But for me, meditation is about sitting with whatever is. It’s taking a break from trying to get better.
Wolves in the Throne Room’s totally fine but also sorta mundane ambient album Celestite (2014) is one of the best examples of something we all hoped would be more interesting than it is. Neurosis’ ongoing Tribes of Neurot project is maybe the best example of ambient music evolving in a metal ecological system.
I think of the intentionally lo-fi RPG ambient/soundtrack music known as dungeon synth in the same way a lot of ID Music listeners probably think of the Grateful Dead: I don’t really understand it, and I’m pretty sure I don’t like it, but I also understand how if you like the parts I don’t like, you might be pretty stoked about it. And that’s great!