Winter Solstice 2024 Void Contemplations
Christmas drones and dirges, guided meditation, and Basking in Gravity for January 2025
Good Morning and Merry Christmas Eve to all those who celebrate and/or are receiving this in an AM time zone! Please enjoy my favorite bootleg Garfield holiday gif . . .
A few quick notes to close out the year:
• For the final two 2024 Inter-Dimensional Music FM broadcasts on Marfa Public Radio and WQRT Indianapolis, we’re revisiting “Cold Comfort: Winter Solstice Drones & Dirges,” two extraordinary episodes from 2023 that are available to you wonderful newsletter heads as one longform mix. It’s an expectedly convoluted two-hour session for the wholly dazed and solstice confused, mixed live from the yoga mat and festooned with language from Dōgen’s Extensive Record, a 2010 translation of the 13 Century Zen Master’s collection of dharma talks, poetry, and other writings. Find the annotated setlist along with streaming and download links in this previous edition of our publication:
In the first hour we'll drift from new age vibrations, old time feelings, and high altitude Christmas gloom, into tranquil overtone singing, avant-goth drone, downpressing folk music, and glacial piano ambience. For hour two, we’ll continue to float through our drafty virtual mediation chamber with Teenage Fanclub covers, gargey pink noise, soft-as-snow shoegaze, anti-capitalist country music, and laid-back winter sludge. Listen for selections from Coil, David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir, Dhyana, Palace Songs, Depeche Mode, Sun Araw, Gavilán Rayna Russom, My Bloody Valentine, Boris, Wooden Wand, Merle Haggard, and Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.
• If more Dōgen verse about cold weather meditation suits the vibe but you’re in the mood for moderately seasonally-appropriate listening that includes more of a North African focus along with detours into vintage California industrial hippie freakouts and some primo CDMX vs JA digi-dancehall, then perhaps consider “Snow Makes The Mountains,” a VØID SUPERSESSION from January 2024, conveniently re-upped to the streaming archive and download library. You can find the mix at the end of a long newsletter about colonoscopies and Freddy Got Fingered below . . .
. . . or you can skip straight to the DL, stream, and setlist here. It’s another live-from-the-yoga-mat session that I’m very proud of! Not much metal in this one, though we do make room for blackened world music from Sepultura plus a super mellow Soulfly jam. Also listen for Tuluum Shimmering, Lamin Fofana, Azu Tiwaline, Cinna Beyghamy, Drexciya, Crash Worship, Aswad, Shackleton, Mdou Moctar, and Robyn.
Basking in Gravity is a meditative space allotted for contemplating connectivity, and a reminder that we exist in concert with all living beings, not in hierarchical order or in competition for names and dominions, but in constant exchange. Or you can tell your friends that it’s a heavy metal yoga class and let them be hopefully pleasantly surprised! We’re back at Healer – Central Indiana’s top-ranking all-ages DIY hXc LBGTQ+ NOTAFLOF dreamatorium – on January 12 from 1-3pm.
Each Basking in Gravity session is unique – our soundtrack is mixed live while we practice, and we almost always switch up the videos as well. The sequence of yin poses stays mostly the same though. Once we have enough regular participants I think it would be rad to do some kind of wordless improvisational slop-style butoh-adjacent version of the project but that’s for later in 2025 at the earliest.
The January sessions are often busier than usual since January is the month when everyone suddenly feels the pressure to fix everything in their lives. Which helps us to distinguish our non-self improvement approach to seeking equanimity in armagideon times from this death cult narrative of endless growth and infinite improvement. Find all the details on our Basking in Gravity info page:
The practice is intended to be accessible for all bodies and experience levels, so feel free to get in touch ahead of time if you have specific questions or concerns.
In the interest of staying busy over these dark and cold months, I’m planning to start producing guided meditation videos once again. As long time listeners to our airwaves, readers of our blogs, and watchers of our videos will know, this newsletter started out as a series of guided meditation videos that I produced with the support of our dear friend Amy Peddycord and Invoke Yoga Studio. It was an attempt during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to give people an opportunity to maintain their practices in accordance with the core principles of compassion and lovingkindness, concepts that meant staying at home was more important that visiting dharma rooms and studios. Too bad we didn’t stick with that plan and over a million people died unnecessarily, but what are you gonna do? Capitalists gonna capitalize!
I’ve created a new dedicated page on the Vøid Contemplation Tactics blogspot with that initial series of six videos, featuring language from Seung Sahn, Joko Beck, Lewis Richmond, Fritjof Capra, and Ezra Bayda. I’m grateful to all of the musicians1 for giving me permission to use their sounds as part of the project. Contributors include Wife Signs, Inner Travels, itta, Mary Lattimore, Joe Denardo, and longtime friends of the show, PJs. Links to all of their tunes can be found on the page as well.
The videos are all part of the ongoing White River, Slow Flow project documenting the riparian corridor that runs through Muncie, Indiana. The new ones will probably be like that as well. You can find other fragments of this project scattered across many previous newsletters, but the video I made with PJS for their longform ambient soother “Eco” is probably the best one . . .
. . . followed by the drainage channel documentation video work that accompanied the November and December Basking in Gravity sessions at Healer and in Berkeley at The Alembic . . .
As always thanks for reading these words, clicking the links, listening to the shows, looking at the videos, coming to the yoga, lurking online, sharing this with your friends, subscribing for free, subscribing for money (!?), or unsubscribing if any of this is getting on your nerves. Here’s to cultivating equanimity in good times, bad times, and in-between times in 2025.
everything is connected
nothing lasts
you are not alone
xox
DC
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I really wanna do one with an edited version of Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss” mantra for the next one but I doubt they’ll be as eager to collaborate so it might be more of a bootleg thing:
Close your eyes, look deep in your soul
Step outside yourself and let your mind go
Close your eyes and forget your name
Step outside yourself and let your thoughts drain