Inter-Dimensional Music: Winter 2023 Digest
Coloring the Air, Impure Flow, and Muchas Garcias
Inter-Dimensional Music continues to be one of the cornerstones of Cosmic Chambo Studio, and we have been having an absolute ball with the show lately, even while – or perhaps because? – we’ve fallen behind on archive updates. This is a considerable achievement for me, personally, as my feelings on the weekly broadcast are usually all over the place.
ID Music was one of the first shows on the WQRT airwaves when we debuted to Central Indiana in December 2016; in May 2024 we’ll be celebrating the 14th anniversary of the show’s Marfa Public Radio genesis. On a good day I’m stoked to have kept this project going for so long! On a bad day I’m looking at hard drives overflowing with lossless heavy mellow, kosmische slop, and other void contemplation musics that I purchased for IRL money, downloaded, played once on the air, and filed away for the future day when I have the opportunity and inclination to listen to 40 or 50 straight hours of cavernous death metal demos and interchangeable New Age soothers. What I’m saying is that sometimes I feel a little weird and even embarrassed that I’ve invested so much time and money into this surprisingly widely distributed and understandably persistently unpopular broadcast media art project.
So when I’m just having fun messing around in the extra bedroom home studio with my 0% vinyl DJ setup and not second-guessing things that probably nobody else is paying attention to, it’s a victory. This Winter 2023 digest features a few of those extra special sets that followed digging through the dusty hard drives. They don’t require much further commentary: I think they’re a lot of fun and I hope you do too.
As always, thanks for reading, listening, clicking the links, lurking, subscribing for free, subscribing for money (!!!), sharing this with your buds, and for unsubscribing if seeing our monthly-ish dispatches in your inbox is no longer a pleasurable experience.
DC
Inter-Dimensional Music 20231124
Muchas Garcias . . . Con un poco de Bob Dylan
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Muchas Garcias is the annual ID Music soundtrack for autumnal gratitude rituals, featuring music made by, inspired by, or somehow otherwise adjacent to Jerry Garcia. Here’s one of the more popular editions from 2021:
ID Music 20211126 - Muchas Garcias
For this year’s Thanksgiving Week practice, it's a very grateful Muchas Garcias edition of ID Music. Please join us for an hour long meditation on gratitude and thankfulness accompanied by the Grateful Dead, music inspired by the Dead, and other sounds tangentially connected to the general vibe of Jerry Garcia. We'll also hear language from Jerry throughout the broadcast.
The 2023 session also features “un poco de Bob Dylan” too, with irie covers of his songs from the Jerry Garcia Band, Built to Spill, Michael Rose, and Keith Hudson. It also has the Sunburned Hand of the Man song that for some reason I always return to unintentionally when finding Sunburned jams to work into Dead sets. That one gets a little gnarly but otherwise this show is free of heavy metals.
Also speaking of being embarrassed I’m embarrassed of how much I love the very awkward and hopefully not too cringey “Struggling Althea” live edit where I’ve got a cappella Jimmy Cliff singing a Jimmy Cliff song that JGB often covered, over an instrumental “Althea” from July 1994.
Language throughout the broadcast excerpted from Garcia: A Signpost to New Space, as slopped and chopped by your host.
To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe. That's why I think it's important to get high.
– Jerry Garcia
Garcia: A Signpost to New Space
Grateful Dead - Row Jimmy (Cosmic Chambo Instrumental Edit) 19740514
Jerry Garcia Band - Knockin' on Heaven's Door 19840913
Built to Spill - Jokerman
Michael Rose - The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Keith Hudson - I Shall Be Released
Sunburned Hand of The Man - Spell It Out
Grateful Dead - A Mostly Quiet Space 19740630 (Save Your Face Version)
Grateful Dead x Jimmy Cliff - Struggling Althea (Cosmic Chambo Edit) 19940703
Grateful Dead - Row Jimmy (Cosmic Chambo Instrumental Edit) 19740514
Dharma: Jerry Garcia
Inter-Dimensional Music 20231117 + 20231201
Coloring the Air I + II
Volume I
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Volume II
stream | download
We haven’t been featuring as much Indian Classical Music on the airwaves of late, so these two sessions are an attempt to make up for lost time. Our selections are focused on contemporary Indian and South Asian-influenced music, using the extremely broad and sorta clumsy guideline of "are there sitars, tablas, tamburas, or instruments mimicking such sounds?” Thus we move from the shaggy Phish-compatible ragas of MV & EE into sleek techno/raga hybrid forms from Four Tet, Jlin, and the trio of Jeff Mills, Jean-Phy Dary, and Prabhu Edouard.
For the second session – archived exclusively for newsletter heads like you! – we travel deeper into the ancient-to-the-future continuum with Westernized ragas from Ontario, doom-drone ragas emanating from south of heaven, full bore war metal with vague allusions to Hindustani devotional traditions, and more trance-inducing techno/raga/poetry fusions from ID Music favorites James Holden and satya.
The second set also includes extraordinary contemporary Indian Classical from Shackleton & Zimpel with Siddhartha Belmannu, and an excerpt The Holy Mother (Plays The Rudra Veena), Madhuvanti Pal’s sublime 2023 album on Sublime Frequencies.
Set I
MV & EE - Free Range
Jeff Mills, Jean-Phy Dary, Prabhu Edouard - Words of Wisdom
Jlin - Kundalini
Four Tet - Morning
Set II
Madhuvanti Pal - Bhairavi (Part 1) (edit)
The Lord † Petra Haden - Yaman
Only Now - Glory (feat. Sheela Bringi)
Shackleton & Zimpel with Siddhartha Belmannu - Everything Must Decay
James Holden - Contains Multitudes
satya - desirepath (edit)
Western Ghats - Origin of Species
Dakhma - Spendarmad (Holy Devotion)
Cult of Fire - दिव्य प्रेम की ज्वाला से दग्ध
Don Cherry, Collin Walcott, Naná Vasconcelos - Inner Organs
Inter-Dimensional Music 20231208
Impure Flow: Unwholesome Action
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Sometimes there’s a complicated thematic overlap between the music I’m listening to and the Zen-ish thing I’m reading. And sometimes I just want to unleash an impure flow soundtrack of freaky organic industrial music, psychedelic ritual trance, cavernous death metal, and a surprise drop from ID Music mainstays Xibalba …
… suitable for doing slop-style slow yoga while contemplating a Top Five Dead or Alive Dōgen banger:
"Even if unwholesome action fills worlds upon worlds, and swallows up all things, refrain from is emancipation.”
Kevin Richard Martin - For those i left behind
Shackleton - Faraway Flowers
KAAL AKUMA - Ignorance is Bliss
Xibalba - Descending Into …
Xibalba - The Place of Fear
Sepultura - Chaos B.C.
DEAFKIDS & PETBRICK - Primeval II
Killing Joke - Wardance
T5UMUT5UMU - Desert
Pailhead - I Will Refuse
Jlin - First Overture (Spiritual Atom)
Kevin Richard Martin - I will be your light
dharma: Zen Master Dōgen - "Refrain from Unwholesome Action"
If you know anyone who might find value or otherwise enjoy Vøid Contemplation Tactics or Inter-Dimensional Music, please pass it along. It means a lot to me! Thank you.
Word of mouth is my primary form of promotion. My reach is limited on social media, which is a good thing as far as my own mental health goes. As Dōgen's teacher told him, “You don't have to collect many people like clouds. Having many fake practitioners is inferior to having a few genuine practitioners. Choose a small number of true persons of the way and become friends with them.”
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"travel deeper into the ancient-to-the-future continuum with Westernized ragas from Ontario, doom-drone ragas emanating from south of heaven, full bore war metal with vague allusions to Hindustani devotional traditions" - love this description! Sending metta!