MEG BOWLES' ULTIMATE AMBIENT-SYNTH CD SHIMMERS

MEG BOWLES

THE SHIMMERING LAND

 

When synthesist Meg Bowles creates her ambient musical soundscapes, she does it as carefully as any classical composer. On her new album, The Shimmering Land, the music has different sections, purposeful movement, counterpoint, shifting textures and specific emotionalism.

 

“When you first listen, it may sound like you are floating in space, but careful discernment unveils a melody and structure there,” explains Bowles, who is a classically-trained musician. “Within the music there are many different layers of listening, and also different ways of listening. I find that whether composing or listening to music, when it’s right I feel a resonance, a moment of truth, like the vibration of a perfect interval in tune.”

 

Bowles has been prominent in the fields of ambient and space music for the past 20 years, since the release of her first two recordings—Inner Space and Solstice Dreams—in 1993. She then stretched the genre’s musical boundaries with a groundbreaking series of commissions from David Bilger, Principal Trumpet of the Philadelphia Orchestra, for new works combining trumpet and synthesizer. The first of these, “Night Sun Journey,” was premiered by Bilger at the International Trumpet Guild Conference, followed by the premiere of “Places Where Rivers Meet” at Washington’s National Cathedral. These works and others for trumpet and synthesizer were featured on From the Dark Earth, with Bilger as soloist.

 

Bowles’ next solo CD was the acclaimed A Quiet Light. Her work also has appeared on two compilation albums, The Other World (Hypnos Recordings) and Soundscape Gallery 2 (Lektronic Soundscapes). In addition, Bowles contributed the opening and closing pieces for the Zodiac series of recordings, a 12-CD classical-crossover set released by Angel/EMI.

 

Bowles’ foremost influence is classical music. She began playing flute at a young age and studied classical music throughout her school years, eventually earning her B.A. degree in music from Boston University. “I am an admirer of Bach for his transcendent clarity, Prokofiev for always putting the wrong note in the right place, Handel and Arvo Pärt for their sacred choral music, Copland for his talent as an orchestrator, and Stravinsky for his overall genius. But even as a child I also had a fascination with electronic music which came to the forefront in my life in the 1980s when I started listening to Steve Roach and also to the Hearts of Space radio show. That started me on the road to composing seriously.”

 

There are other influences in Bowles’ music as well. She is a licensed psychoanalyst

specializing in working with dreams, creativity, and trauma. She has extensively studied both Jungian psychology and shamanism. “Jung wrote that the psyche strives towards wholeness and consciousness. One of the questions I always ask is: How do we want to express our creativity in the world? On a personal level, my interest in the psyche cannot be separated from my interest in creating music.”

 

Often inspired by a combination of “awe and wonder” regarding the cosmos, outer space and celestial bodies, Bowles also views more terrestrial nature as “a huge inspiration, whether I’m walking in the woods, listening to the natural sounds found outdoors, enjoying waves on a shoreline, or studying the night sky.”

 

The Shimmering Land album begins with the ebb and flow of “Undulant Sea” with its wave-like rocking motion and powerful underlying emotionalism. “Our oceans are what make life on Earth possible, and humankind first visited the far corners of our world by sea travel, so this piece contains the up-and-down motion, the rocking movement of the sea, symbolic of the beginning of the journey.” The composition “The Sweetness of Mist” was inspired by the haze that sometimes envelops her Connecticut island home. “Mist creates a hushed, mystical, magical environment and recalls the fables about Avalon. I tried to capture the feeling of suspense, the look of diffused light, and the majesty of nature shrouded and not quite seen clearly.”

 

With “Venus Rising,” Bowles says she attempted to musically conjure the sense of a planet rising on the horizon and moving across the sky. “Venus recently came as close to Earth as it ever does, and Venus holds a special place in mythology with its feminine mystique, so I had strong feelings as I was writing.” Regarding “Into The Gloaming,” she states, “Twilight is a very magical time as the sky shifts toward deep blue and then darkness. It’s also representative of the later years of our lives, and the question arises as to how we will handle it—with fear and uncertainty, or with a sense of adventure and growth.”

 

“Beneath the Radiant Stars” serves as a tribute to anyone who has lain outside at night, watching the flickering light of far-off stars as they move across the sky. “Space music seeks to illuminate the wondrous love affair humans have with the stars and the cosmos. The almost flute-like melody represents travel out into hushed space and then returning.” On “Nightwalk Across the Isle of Dream,” Bowles was inspired not only by after-dark hikes with her dogs, but also by the idea of “a dreamland where extraordinary things can happen, a place where we can explore other realities and our deeper consciousness.”

 

Bowles explains, “I’m crafting what I call ambient orchestral soundscapes. There are some symphonic elements that are more classical in structure, and I do tend to specifically have a beginning, a middle and an ending for each piece. I like the idea that music can take the listener out of this world to another place, a deeper space. I want listeners to engage with the music with their mind, body and heart.”

 

Meg Bowles’ musical journey began as a child growing up with a wide variety of classical music at home. Her father is a musicologist and timpanist who has published widely in the areas of medieval musical instruments and performance practices as well as the history of the timpani and the impact of technology on instrument-building. The whole family enjoyed the opera (“We all shared a love of Don Giovanni by Mozart,” says Bowles). She started on recorder at age seven, switched to flute two years later, played in school bands and youth orchestras, performed in major venues (Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap National

Park for the Performing Arts), and studied privately under top musicians throughout college.

 

“We not only played all sorts of classical music around the house, we also had this album of music for electronic tape composed by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. It was other-worldly sounding, sort of sci-fi spooky like the ‘Outer Limits’ TV show soundtrack. I was fascinated by this early electronic music. When I finally got a synthesizer in the early ‘90s, I realized how much I loved, and wanted to create music with, those synthesized sounds.”

 

After getting her degree in music, Bowles earned an M.B.A. in finance from Columbia University (she worked in investment banking for several years). She then decided to pursue her interest in analytical psychology and graduated from the Westchester Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

 

“I try to help people reconnect to their inner life by giving them a space to listen to the deepest parts of themselves, and to tell the stories that emanate from that authentic place of soul. That is what gives the outer life meaning. This has a lot in common with creating and appreciating music which also is most meaningful with deep listening. With my music I work with sounds like a painter or sculptor works in their medium, layer upon layer to come up with the finished artistic endeavor. I’m a synthesist in more ways than one because I pull threads together from many different sources, places and feelings.”

 

The Shimmering Land, released on Kumatone Records, can be purchased as a CD or digital downloads at a variety of online sales including CDbaby, Amazon, iTunes and many others. For more information about Meg Bowles and her music, visit her website, megbowlesmusic.com.

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PURE HEART ENSEMBLE BRINGS BLISS TO YOUR BEING

THE PURE HEART ENSEMBLE

Bliss of Being

 

Renowned new age pianist Richard Shulman and four of his musician friends (adding cello, flutes, wordless vocals and crystal bowls) have banded together as The Pure Heart Ensemble and created an acoustic recording, Bliss of Being, that not only celebrates the feeling of bliss, but also the journey getting there.

 

“To me,” states Shulman, “the ‘Bliss of Being’ is to be so present in the moment that all is experienced as Divine. Bliss is a state of calmness, peace, happiness, health and spirituality, and has a feeling of Life, supercharged.  The whole album is a journey towards bliss beginning with relaxation and healing and moving through feelings of beauty, wonder, joy and presence.  Although bliss as an end result is the ultimate destination, the journey is of great importance because it represents learning, healing and individual growth along the way.  The journey not only gets us there, allows us to arrive, but also prepares us to recognize, utilize and enjoy bliss.”

 

On Bliss of Being, Shulman is joined by cellist Adriana Contino, flutist Kate Steinbeck, vocalist Dielle Ciesco and crystal bowl player Bob Hinkle.  Their individual journeys, and the experience of creating this recording as part of a group, imbued the music with a special emotional resonance.  “Each of us had to step through the door of trust into that place of pure heart where the music flows in Divine cadence,” explains Shulman.  “As we passed through that spiritual and emotional passageway, to a place of love and bliss, we surrendered our personal selves, opened our hearts to this ecstatic music flowing through us, and allowed the music to express a level of higher consciousness.”

 

Bliss of Being, on the RichHeart Music label, is available at www.richheartmusic.com as well as online sales sites including CDbaby, Amazon, iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic among others.

 

Richard Shulman has become one of the leading musicians in the new age genre over the past few decades.  But Shulman also was trained in the classical and jazz fields, and regularly performs and records original jazz with his trio.  Shulman has 23 albums under his own name as well as more than two-dozen other recordings for which he has provided compositions, performances or production.  He studied at the prestigious Eastman School of Music, got his Masters Degree in musical composition from State University of New York at Buffalo, and was a composer-performer for a decade with Theatre of the Heart -- a New York City-based performance group working to bring higher consciousness and environmental awareness to audiences.  Although Shulman’s recordings are varied, he is especially known for creating music for healing, alignment and meditation including A Higher Dimension, Light Music, First Rites, Light from Assisi, Keeper of the Holy Grail, Music of Peace and 11:11 Piano Meditations for Awakening.  Shulman also has devoted considerable energy to a special project, Camelot Reawakened: A Vision Fulfilled which includes a CD, a DVD-video and a theatrical musical (“A Dream of Camelot”).

 

Cellist Adriana Contino completed her studies at Indiana University and became the youngest member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (under Andre Previn).  She went to New York City and founded the Bach Chamber Soloists, and performed with the New York Chamber Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New York New Music Ensemble, the jazz group String Fever, and Richard Shulman (they released a duet album, New Beginnings, in 2003).  Contino went to Germany and for more than two decades served as professor of cello, baroque cello and chamber music at the Hochschule fuer Musik, and while there also was the principal cellist of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (their first female principal).  She currently teaches at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.

 

An international performer, teacher and music producer, flutist Kate Steinbeck (KateSteinbeck.com) is the founder and director of Pan Harmonia (pan-harmonia.org), a professional collective based in Asheville NC, which produces world-class classical and ethnic-world-fusion music.  Kate studied with William Hebert at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio.  As a Fulbright scholar, she earned a First Prize in chamber music from the Belgium Royal Conservatory in Liege and later performed and taught music in Germany for several years.  She holds a Master’s Degree from the San Francisco Conservatory where she studied with Tim Day.  Kate has produced two CDs, Light in the Corner and Luminescence and plays exclusively on a modern wooden flute manufactured by her husband, Chris Abell.

 

Vocalist Dielle Ciesco specializes in the transformational power of the voice to heal and connect us with our own Divinity.  She says, “I am passionate about every voice, be it the one we use everyday to communicate, the ones we hear inside our heads, the silent voice of wisdom, voices raised in song, or the ones that call us to awaken.”  She was a featured vocalist with Visionary Music (creators of DNA Activation Music) on their TLC Series.  Ciesco also is the author of the book The Unknown Mother: A Magical Walk with the Goddess of Sound.  More information is available at DielloCiesco.com.

 

Crystal-bowl performer Bob Hinkle has worn many hats during his lengthy musical career -- singer, songwriter, poet, recording artist, composer/lyricist, corporate executive, consultant, artist manager, executive producer and record label founder-president.  He recorded numerous albums with his trio, The Good Earth, and had a solo album, Ollie Mogus.  He performed with Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.  As a manager he worked with The J. Geils Band, Etta James, Harry Chapin, Patti Lupone, Kenny Rogers and many others.  He founded both The Children’s Group (Classical Kids music) and Zoom Express (children and family entertainment such as Early Ears).

 

These five musicians came together to form The Pure Heart Ensemble and record the Bliss of Being CD (and perform select concerts).  Shulman began the musical adventure by composing the lead-off track, “The Bliss of Healing,” and arranging the nearly 11-and-a-half-minute piece to accommodate the other musicians.  The rest of the music initially derived from Shulman and Contino improvisations (they have a strong rapport from having worked together previously).  “I took three of our shorter improvs -- ‘Remembering the Goal,’ ‘Remembering the Bliss’ and ‘When We Go Home We Go Together’ -- and arranged parts for flute and/or voice turning these pieces into more structured compositions,” explains Shulman.  “However, the other eight tunes are group improvisations straight from our hearts.”

 

The second piece on the album, “Beginning the Journey,” starts very slow and appropriately searches for a direction before finding its way.  There are longer tunes such as the more than nine-minute “Heading Home” and the 11-minute “Divine Connection” (the one piece with a synth drone in the background), but these are balanced by several in the two-minute range including the only solo-piano piece, “Resting in God.”  The album ends with the lovely piano-cello duet “Loving All” and the beautifully-melodic “When We Go Home We Go Together” (which Shulman says, “helps to ground our energies in a sweet happiness.”).

 

“When I began the album,” explains Shulman, “I had in mind music that could help people relax and heal, and after starting to write the first track, I found that this music was powerfully helping me come to a state of release and gratitude.  There is an experience I have had many times where I bring my awareness in a compassionate, loving and non-judgemental way into an area of pain or density in my body.  I find that in the acceptance of the situation, a grace may come in which presence and love allow the opening of communication with the tension or pain which can then become a communion with Life or God.  The purpose of this music was to create a musical soundtrack in which this process could be awakened.  For me, the bliss of healing is that visceral experience of moving from pain to bliss as tension melts in the presence of Agape or Divine Love.  During the recording, as each of us surrendered our limitations and found our bliss, it made it possible to create this music, and we hope that translates into a healing process and natural inner alignment for the listener as well.”