The ancient kingdom of Tibet, high and remote in the Himalayan Mountains dividing India and China, is physically and culturally about as far as westerners can go from home.
The Buddhist religion of Tibet was derived from the Mahayana Buddhism of Northern India in the 8th century. It’s a rich tradition. For over a thousand years, Tibetan Buddhist monks have created some of the world’s most extraordinary sacred art and architecture. They also invented resonant metal percussion instruments—bells, “singing” bowls, gongs, and cymbals—and giant horns that emit sepulchral bass drones that seem to summon the spirits of the dead.
These bronze instruments and the ceremonial religious music they created were kept secret for centuries until the 1960’s, when a new breed of western artist-adventurers made the arduous trek over the mountains to the monasteries. Facing existential threats from China, the monks allowed these unofficial emissaries from the west to buy authentic Tibetan instruments and bring them home for safekeeping.
Before 1972 there were only a few ethnographic field recordings of Tibetan religious rituals. That was the year that HENRY WOLFF, NANCY HENNINGS, and DREW GLADSTONE returned to London from Tibet, booked a famous recording studio, and produced “TIBETAN BELLS,” the first album of original music for Tibetan instruments. It could hardly have been more exotic, but it was beautiful, and in the open-minded culture of the 1970s the album attracted the attention of Island Records—home of Bob Marley and reggae—and was given a worldwide release. The bells of Tibet had come to the west.
The sound they pioneered was not based on Tibetan religious music or western experimental percussion, but an invented language of pure tones with uncanny sustain, harmonic and inharmonic drones, fractal waveforms, spectral overtones, and extended resonant decays. In the intervening decades, it inspired practitioners of therapeutic “sound healing,” and more recently, the immersive group meditations of the “sound bath” movement.
On this transmission of Hearts of Space, the eternal sound of Tibetan bells, bowls, and gongs, featuring sonic meditations by KEVIN BRAHENY-FORTUNE, plus music by HIMALAYAN VOICES, HANS CHRISTIAN, JACUB LEONOWICZ, and KENT SPARLING. A program called “SUBLIME CONTINUITIES”—on this transmission of Hearts of Space.
