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The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and so find the stability and confidence you will need to live, and die, well. Meditation is the road to enlightenment.- Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
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Lotus Beat two is mostly dark psy trance, with breaks, techno, drum and bass configurations and an often times surreal presentation of the thematics, a bit like Dali or Escher on acid, if they had electric toys like we have now. A befriended DJ got me to slow some of this shit down so it is more danceable, and then i made it sound very haus-techno, with claps and hard kicks; But mostly you can feel the Bardo, all pieces have a distinct drive and vibe, travelling with panoramas to match their velocity. I played this stuff to a producer and he said that some of lotus beat II sounds ”harsh, impatient, driven, relentless and machine like”, and i replied: “You got it man!”
The Bardo beings perception is seven times more powerful then a human’s, imagine your senses that sharp! A lot of the samples come from a trancer friend, who biffed playing and gave me whole collection, awesome dude! Just going through the third pass of editing and fleshing out the drum texture smore, had a few funny accidents with PS 3 drum synth and guitar midi, which made for some interesting loops. i have chanted on a couple of tracks and there is a really cool loop of Tibetan monks i recored at Sera Je during my last meditation retreat, plus and that is going to be a big chnage; i sing in German again, mostly becasue the language allows for some expressiions that English is too contextual for and becasue that is the way the lyrics cmae out of the vortex.
Just being able to freely compose again after years of self imposed restriciton is very refreshing. So there is a definate avant-garde element in lotus beat II, which makes the music surprising and unpredicatble, just like a good power switch.
i am thinking i should start uploading and make it all available, but am too wooried still about the mastering quality.
Can be played with
Phaeder
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Lotus Beat 2 is what we used to call trippy in the 70s, mix of opium and speed, kinda sureal trance, but with 21st century attitude, as in “hip cosmopolitan, multi culture”, for lack of better metaphore. just thinking about mixing Germanic, almost third reich choir vocals on a bed of hard-harsh analogue basses and brutal drums, with a dominating back beat. I wondered what would happen after the first vortextual explosion, but then life kicked in and i forgot to check on that again. So now, after having had a few moments of divergence, i would like to say that a nouveaus trance sureal is emerging, as if Salvadore Dali would mix photoshop palettes with Magritte and borrow the vexing pictures of Mauricius Escher, with old schule beat sense, that is the first volley of LOTUS BEAT 2. Interestingly so, that was not my intention. i wanted fast trance, because i only pogo dance, but you surely could dance to LOTUS BEAT 2! Thee are some fast pieces here though, 150 BpM upwards. Some of the other incursions are at dance floor speed around 126 BpM - 134 BpM, some down beat and even ambiences. If i had to put all of that on a cd i would make two albums out of it, but in cyberspace, it doesn’t matter, people mix an dmatch there own music anyway they like. The power of downloadable media!
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So many people have asked me now about hairy MacLary, (once they made the connection between Phaeder and Peter Haeder).
Yes, i wrote the music for those videos/DVDs (all ten of them) and it was real fun to do. You have to think very different if you want to please smaller listeners and grab their attention, thus the hook in the theme, which i played on guitar first and then translated it to piccolo flute, because it has such a cheeky, beckoning timbre.
Hope this helps
P
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“Vive l’Avantgarde” is a new digital art piece by Phaeder.
“Vive l’Aavantgarde!” is a morphogenetic duplication icon, something like a” Gothic Spielwerk” of the 15th century (if they had Goth taste, that is) with the potential to become a cyber form of Indra’s net of jewels.
At it’s centre it has the age old tradition of alchemy, mandala painters, Shamans. That tradition manifests through it’s visual appearance, like a 13th century icon or a Gothic imprint. The external layer of communication is extended to the audio realm through an undulating sound collage in the tradition of late 40s “noise artists” (i improvised quite a bit of noise art in the early ’80s.) This component of the work is represented in the lessee fair and looseness in which the artist used rhythmical structures in an organic, avantgarde way to break free from the confines of western four on the floor mentality and invite the eastern trance and Xpand mode. Last not least the spiritual eeriness of some meditation practices in the form of an ever so subtly changing halo around the idoru’s head manifesting in different hues of the visible spectrum of light, while the music ever so subtly morphs through it’s phases of programmatic continuation of the theme: “Vive l’Avantgarde!” and because this is a piece of digital concept art it had to have some sort of conceptual frame around it as a basis for it’d creation. That aspects manifests in the length of the piece, 1 minute and eight seconds, which represents the auspicious number of mantras in a large round and ultimately the number of beads on a Mala, 108.
Format: Flash video
Duration: 1:08
Medium: multi chrome on LCD
Resolutions of start product:
Audio - 44.1 kHz wav format PCM
Visual - 1200 DpIVive l’Avantgarde stock images
Resolutions of end product:
Audio - 32mbps MP3, Wav, flac. 44.1 kHz, 16 bits
Visual - 72px web format
Original Size: 257 px wide x 243 px high
Coefficient Variations: Visual and Audio are desynchronized to promote random pattern fluctuations
Distribution: Web (HTML Files)
Video File Format: SWF
Frame Rate: 10 frames/second
Video Dimensions: 319×304
Colors: High Color (16-bit)
JPEG Encoding: Enabled
JPEG Quality: 60
Include Audio Track: Yes
Audio Codec: MPEG Layer-3
Audio Format: 44.100kHz, Stereo, 56kBits/sec
Embed HTML: Yes
Table of Contents: No
variable attributes: can be looped by user, volume can be manipulated by user, screen
settings can be manipulated by user,
Realm convergences: audio, visual
Object locale: cyber space only - do not physically manifest on external media, thsi is a
cyber only object.
hyperlinks to URLs where the object can be obtained: Vive l’Avantgarde