For several decades, a small group of Western musicians have studied the ancient practice of shamanism and shamanistic music, as a way of deepening their art and their connection to the natural world.
In aboriginal and tribal cultures from the Arctic to Australia, the role of the shaman was to bridge the human and the spirit world for guidance and healing. Today, neo-shamanism and neo-shamanistic music express a longing for direct spirituality, wholeness and harmony with nature that some find lacking in our culture.
Starting from prehistoric forms of music and aboriginal instruments like the rattle, the drum, the bone whistle and the didgeridoo, they added the ambient dimensions of electronic sound and created a new genre called “techno-tribal.” Earthy and trance-inducing, it rescued electronic music from ethereal abstraction, grounded it in the sounds and rhythms of the natural world, and influenced the ecstatic electronic dance music of today.
On this transmission of Hearts of Space, we beat the drum and rattle the bones, on a journey called “DREAM TRACKER.” Shamanic poet JOSIE TAMARIN puts it this way:
The lost world waits in darkness and dream;
And in dreamworlds gods and goddesses
Beat the pulse of prayer
Dancing near blazing fires
Drumming toward greater light
Creating song from cries of loss
Fanning the glowing embers of the heart.
(quoted by MICHAEL HARNER in “The Way of the Shaman”)
Music by BYRON METCALF, DASHMESH KHALSA & STEVE ROACH; TERRA AMBIENT, CHAD KETTERING, TUU, and SCOTT AUGUST.