Slow & Low Midwinter Ambience

Fluorescent psychedelia, post-solstice blues, and Peter Gabriel bootlegs

The tree is alive and never comes down but no shame over the ornaments and lights still being on there as our extremely old and very good boy Otter Pops is still riding the vibe and this was probably his last solstice so he makes the rules.

So far in 2023 we’ve been rolling slow and low here on the low-rolling prairie of East Central Indiana. The Winter Solstice holidays were nice and quiet, with the weather outside alternating between sub-zero and gray, and the new normal of just-above-freezing and gray. Going muddin’ in our ancient Subaru is a winter sport at this point in the Midwest US’ global warming timeline, while sledding or cross-country skiing has migrated north along with the burgeoning tick population.

And then we got sick for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic: No ‘rona but I was more uncomfortable for the cold’s duration than I’ve ever been wearing a mask. Yet another reason to continue with the preventative measures to which we have become accustomed, even if we are the only people in the grocery store still masked up.

Inter-Dimensional Music has been slow-coming, or rather the newsletter updates annotating our weekly IRL on-air FM broadcast have slowed up a bit while the show itself continues to hit the airwaves on schedule. In keeping with our lived off-air pace, we’ve turned up the mellow for these two most recent broadcasts. If you usually skip the audio accompaniment for fear of a jarring pivot from percolating New Age soothers to screeching kosmische grindcore, they may be of interest.

They’re not really “best of 2022” shows, but each episode includes some of my favorite music of the year. Here are a few highlights and notes on the vibe:

Shout out to the artists like Najee-Zaid whose band camp pages contain only one (1) perfect song¹ that expresses an electronic infinity of spiritual ambient revelations in a mere 2m and 32s. The Chicago-based makeup artist, educator, audio engineer, and musician first crossed my timeline thanks to Angel Bat Dawid. His guest session on her NTS show sounds like an exploded version of the perfect 152 seconds of "Immersion." A condensed audio burst of restorative SADlight beams.

One of the luxuries of making this community radio broadcast as part of a long-game art project is I don’t have to worry about playing a song more than once, or returning to the same artist over² and over. We can find something deep and weird, and settle in for awhile. Wau Wau Collectif is a great example as each of their songs flows easily into the next, but each taken on its own sounds like the work of a completely different group. Dubbed-out Senegalese spiritual jazz and non-denominational psychedelic devotionals full of infinite possibility.

Wau Wau Collectif is a product of Senegalese-Swedish collaboration, and fits in well with The Majestic Yes, English artist Sam Shackleton’s EP of new work built from Beaugars Seck’s sabar drum rhythms, recorded in Senegal in 2020. Likewise, Shackleton’s deep and still expanding catalog of self-described “psychedelic ritual trance” has been and will remain a mainstay on the ID Music airwaves, with selections ranging from the uneasy occult dub paranoia to the sort of compositions heard on this most recent program that conjure something “wondrous, twinkling with light.”

Longtime listeners of our airwaves will be well-familiar with the work of Steve Targo, whose sounds have been in the mix since we first encountered his New Age meditation music as Inner Travels. We also featured Steve’s music on the 20200406 edition of our Void Contemplation Tactics meditation video series, along with language from Joko Beck.

With the Nimbudala project, Targo expands his vintage ambient music palette with some of the heady New Age-informed jazz aesthetics that I associate most often with Carlos Niño-affiliated projects. It’s a continuation of New Age/jazz crossover, but Targo also adds kosmische guitar drift [correction! Targo writes in to clarify that “I didn’t actually play any guitars. It was a synthesizer. My approach to the keyboard was an attempt to mimic how a guitarist would play.” Cosmic Chambo Studio regrets the error.] that wouldn’t sound out of place on a collection of Meddle outtakes or as “He Loved Him Madly” interludes between clouds of Miles’ wah-wah trumpet haze. 2022 was a tremendous year for this kind of zone, with artists as diverse as fellow nuevo New Age travelers Skyminds, riparian field recordist Inkarose, the drizzly post-black metal ambient project Crooked Light, and spiritual polymath Surya Botofasina contributing freshly hybridized strains to the thriving ambient jazz ecosystem³.

After several months of working Cure bootlegs into the flow, we decided to switch things up. Producing an understandably unpopular yet surprisingly long-running broadcast media art project as a volunteer for community radio stations means never having to apologize for including a Peter Gabriel bootleg on a show that started out as a Manuel Göttsching tribute.

We also decided to keep sitting with the comfort of Thich Nhat Hanh’s language from The Art of Living …

… as we continue with our seasonally appropriate meditations on the beginnings, in-betweens, and endings that fuel the suffering that connects us mortals.

As always, thank you for being here as a lurker, free subscriber, paying subscriber, former paying subscriber, confused yoga workshop participant, or however you choose to identify yourself. It is always a pleasure and a privilege to sit down at the computer and breathe with all of you for a moment or two.

blessing up + blessing down,
DC

If you know anyone who might find value or otherwise enjoy some aspect of Void Contemplation Tactics or Inter-Dimensional Music, please pass it along. It means a lot to me!

My reach is limited on social media, which I’m increasingly convinced is a good thing. 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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Inter-Dimensional Music 20230106
North America's Gnarliest Mix of rhythmically dense and sonically weightless sounds

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For this week's session, we start out celebrating the life and music of visionary kosmische guitarist Manuel Göttsching with music from Ash Ra Tempel, and close with a choice selection from The Private Tapes collection. We’ll also hear sounds from artists whose work continues those transcendent traditions. A frivolous celebration – as there are far better and more well-informed eulogies and recirculating interviews to mark the passing of this extraordinary individual, whose work ranges from foundational Krautrock anthems, synth-bliss New Age music, to "E2-E4,” a masterpiece that friend of the show Dada Strain describes as “one of the most quietly influential dance records of the last 40 years, and it's essentially a psychedelic rock piece” – but a celebration nonetheless.

A detour into live Peter Gabriel from 1987 awaits the diligent practitioner in the latter half of our program, along with constantly shifting Senegalese spiritual dub vibrations. 

As is our tradition with memorials, we'll hear language from Thich Nhat Hanh on waves, oceans, and mortality throughout the hour. 

artist – work
Ash Ra Tempel - Slightly Delayed
Tarotplane - Omayyad
Nimbudala - Peace Rock II
Bitchin Bajas - World B. Free
Peter Gabriel - In Your Eyes (19870721, The Spectrum, Philadelphia)
Wau Wau Collectif - Jarabi
Manuel Göttsching - Halensee (excerpt)
☸️ Thich Nhat Hanh - The Art of Living

📹 Ashra for Spanish television 1981 (Cosmic Chambo oversaturation edit)
🔊 Ashra x Tarotplane
☸️ Thich Nhat Hanh - The Art of Living

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Inter-Dimensional Music 20230113
North America's Gnarliest Mix of Fluorescent Winter Ambience

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For this week's session, it's an hour of blissed-out ambient music and complementary SADlight frequencies that may offer feelings of catharsis, purification, or wonder. The vibe moves from Detroit and Chicago’s fluorescent spiritual reveries to twinkling bass-forward SWANA meditation music, and more dubwise Senegalese psychedelia. 

We've been feeling especially vulnerable and mortal during this gray and damp season, so we're still thinking about Thich Nhat Hanh's language about waves returning to the ocean.

artist - work
dj))water)) - the nameless ones (edit)
Najee-Zaid - Immersion
Nova Zaii - B tterfl
Nova Zaii - } {
Ora Pois - balmoan
Ultrafog - Golden Tundra
SHIVARASA - Azadi
Shackleton - The Stick And Twist Mood
Wau Wau Collectif - Pitchou Goudibi
Leslie Keffer - Luminous
dj))water)) - the nameless ones (edit)
☸️ Thich Nhat Hanh - The Art of Living

📹 Cosmic Chambo - untitled WIP (Prairie Creek Reservoir slo-mo inverted saturation edit)
🔉 dj))water)) - the nameless ones
☸️ Thich Nhat Hanh - The Art of Living

You can help make Void Contemplation Tactics an emotionally rewarding and/or slightly less unprofitable project by sharing this post, subscribing for free, subscribing for money, and/or purchasing music from the artists we play on the Inter-Dimensional Music airwaves. Breathe deep in the Bandcamp library. And thank you.

1. I appreciate and respect the spirit of inclusivity and generosity that characterizes music in the digital age, but “more” is not always better. It is sometimes exhausting. If your compilation has over 100 selections, I feel like I’m helping you sort through your label’s inbox after and open call for demo tapes.

2. I think about this whenever I listen to Bumpin’ on Sunset and another Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan or Stevie Wonder deep cut comes up in their radically eclectic mix. As we wrote in the Abiquiú Zones issue of Void Contemplation Tactics, “BoS offers a beautiful world view that sees Bonnie Raitt, Dâm-Funk, Marisa Anderson & William Tyler, David Crosby, Burna Boy, Ahmad Jamal, Leon Ware, and Emeralds as part of the same continuum.”

Abiquiú Zones

3. A lot of this stuff reminds me of Sun Araw’s 2010 On Patrol-era iteration, which is some of my favorite music of all time, and captures the oozing crepuscular ambiance of the most cryptical Miles vibes in a distinctly different format. Sort of in the same way Sunn O))) handles that aesthetic and comes up with something both related yet almost entirely distinct.