“For Sacred Tonalities, I decided to create a sonic aid which could be used as a guide through these meditations. The music features a wide spectrum of frequencies, allowing the listener to pick and choose what they want to focus on or lose themselves in. It starts off pretty timid, almost frail, and grows into a textural and spacial soundscape, which tells its own story, sometimes a bit different on subsequent listens. I spent a lot of time peeling apart these layers myself, picking this or that slow-beating vibration as the focus to see where it leads and changing the emphasis of the melody so that the listener can ride any sound wave they want. And so, the tonalities become a device in themselves, to escort the meditator during their journey.

On the technical side, I often started by painting the ground layer with super wide brush strokes, always using a hardware synth, ranging from analogue modular to wavetable or granular synthesis, including a lot of gear from the late 90s. If you’re familiar with these synths, you may be able to pick out the classics, like Roland JP-8000, Clavia Nord Lead, Novation Nova, Access Virus C, and some newer ones, like Argon 8M, Waldorf Iridium and ASM Hydrasynth. I enjoy designing sound from scratch here, playing with modulated harmonics, gritty and soft. If you listen closely, you will hear layers, layers, layers, moving, fluctuating, and constantly rearranging themselves. Then, when this amorphous blob is nearly finished, I start drawing the outlines of the main melody, accentuating it with bass, piano, and lead arpeggios to give it some rhythm. Finally, when this sonic sculpture is almost complete, I chisel away and remove many things, stripping some structure and polishing off the edges.”

“Tonality Number One, the first track, expands from a single solitary held tone until synth textures surround us, enveloping us in warmth, evolving in ways we don’t fully understand. In the remaining six tonalities that make up the album, we’re shown multiple versions of the same truth, a truth not easily expressed in words (see the convoluted attempts at the end of the preceding paragraph!) but familiar to anyone who has spent time concentrating on their breath and letting go of themself. At times, synth arpeggios loop around us, reflecting the circularity of experience. In the final track, as if presaging death, distortion builds to a climax topped by the decay of a single piano note. Having listened to the album on repeat several times, there’s something reassuring about the return of the solitary tone that opens it: yes, time will ultimately kill us, but we will continue. ”