Customer Reviews

Still Life - Volume One

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Too many years ago I went through something few working Americans ever get a chance to experience - a three-week vacation. Bear with me for a minute. Workaholic that I am, I spent the first week bolting awake at 7 a.m., rushing through my shower, inhaling my breakfast, fidgeting on the beach, checking voicemail, making to-do lists. But by the end of the second week, something funny happened. Staring out to sea, I noticed a couple of kids trying to body surf. They swam out, frantically tried to catch a wave, missed it, swam back out, missed it, again and again, the same pattern - swim, miss, swim, miss. This went on for quite a while, until quite unexpectedly, one of the kids did catch a wave. It lifted him up and carried him forward and gently settled him onto the beach at my feet. And I laughed. For the third week of my vacation, I slept in, took two-hours at breakfast, swam in the ocean.

What I'm getting at is a rather subtle, but potent issue about time, and how we spend it. The majority of the music we listen to is like fast food - extremes of dynamics, texture, sound, text - all crammed into three minutes. Television, work, movies, phone calls, shopping - it's all the same bit. What's so very different, and good, about these Still Life recordings is that they take their time. Aside from feeling remarkably calm and relaxed after listening to the first disc, I found myself wondering at the amount of time I had wasted in front of the television or aimlessly shopping online for nothing. The value is in the very act of allowing yourself to sit down and wait for the music to unfold, very slowly, very carefully - not the first three minutes, but the entire disc. These pieces are full of wonderful surprises, all of them completely natural in sound, but the kind of surprises that you have to first relax and wait for to let happen.

Highly recommended.

This record caused physical change in my body. When I hit play, I was feeling a little tense that day- my shoulders were all bunchy, my neck was tight. The CD began with the opening strains of a far off drone growing from nothing, so slowly and naturally and beautifully, so meditatively, I didn't even realize that by the time I was 20 minutes into it, i was somewhere else. I was flying in my own body, soaring over icelandic fields, my body coming to rest, I was breathing from a deep place. It so very very rarely happens that music had this effect on me. By the time the first track faded so organically slowly into the music of birds singing on a spring morning and childern laughing and singing in the distance, I found myself calm and still and centered. This is music.

"As a licensed acupuncturist and also a musician, I've always found it

difficult to find music that stands up well to repeated listening in my

sessions with patients and something that I will also enjoy even after

having heard it numerous times. It's usually either too short,

too jarring and/or intrusive or just too cheesy.

Most other CDs like this get some of right, but I find myself skipping through tracks.

These guys get it right for the entire cd and the series as a whole.

Finding the Still Life Series has been great.

The music sets the perfect mood and the patients find themselves completely relaxed as the music gently moves along.

A number of people talk about experiencing a feeling of

transcendence and floating during their treatments. I highly recommend

Volume One or any of the Still Life cds to anyone who wants to relax

and let their mind wander in a very beautiful place."

NYC licensed acupuncturist

This is really good meditation & relaxation audio. I like it a lot, but at about 21 minutes into the first track and again at 31 minutes they overlaid the sounds of children playing outdoors at a playground. It's brief, but for me it's a big intrusion and makes the track as a whole mostly unusable for the purpose I bought it for. There's almost no other sound effects overlaid on the track and it baffles me why they would choose to add this here. If I could get the track without that addition it would be 4 stars, maybe 5.

This cd is the first of its kind. A patient soundscape that makes all worldly thoughts fall away - leaving you to reaqauint with the real you. This cd implies and encourages health, self-awareness, and honesty. It was made with those intentions and it can help you to find those things in a world that almost prohibits all three. If you practice yoga, meditation or any other breath-conscious art get the whole series of these cds.