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Music for the Thirty-five Buddhas. by Ivan Sokolovsky, Man'Music newspaper, April 2002
While listening to this album, I realised a profound and unbreakable connection between the music and the worldview of its author that is extremely rare these days. Likely 99.99% of contemporary cultural figures have, in the best case, a “declarative” outlook which is just their “personal matter” and is in no way reflected in their creative output. If there remains 0.01% of people for whom the act of creation needs to be exclusively in agreement with their own life experiences and worldviews, then Anton Batagov belongs in their number. For Batagov, the genuine essence of music is “… not a means of egoistic self-assertion, but that of the cognition of absolute reality and the universal order of the world.” First of all, Music for Thirty-five Buddhas is not New Age or Ethnic music, although superficially there are a few resemblances. We are already habituated to including such calm and soothing meditative music in these genres. But New Age is comfortable beautiful commercial music to pleasantly pass the time, and Ethnic is something geopolitically localised and, in addition, extremely conservative and canonical. Music for Thirty-five Buddhas clearly doesn’t duplicate the Ethnic canon and elements, and doesn’t strive for the softness and comfort of New Age. It is pure meditation, some kind of experience outside of time and space, an experience of concentration and reflection on the theme of “emptiness” in the Buddhist conception of the word. Unlike New Age music, this album is not for therapy and furthermore doesn’t assume that its listeners are neurotic depressives. The fundamental emotional background here is the calm and joyful disposition of a person striving for enlightenment on the path of knowledge of the ultimate truth of existence. There is not emotion in the everyday meaning of the word as it is difficult to name a state of mind as an “emotion”. Emotions, rather, reflect the illusory nature of our individual existences. Speculation can be minor, major, atonal, polyphonic… This CD may (and must) be put on repeat, and then you will be able to attain an amazing state of being outside of time and space. Then will appear the perception of “emptiness” as something tangible and hyper real. The sound of this recording is very precise. With all of its timbral solidity, the sound is extremely localised in space. The sound stage is the work of a jeweller – a great achievement for Batagov as a sound engineer. The choice of instruments is extremely laconic: piano (Anton Batagov), vibraphone and metal percussion (Peteris Shunyatis), and the voices of Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche and Venerable Ani Karin. The disk includes just two tracks totalling 62 minutes that seem to go on forever (in th e good sense! ). The use of metal percussion accentuates the presence of an emptiness. This effect would not be possible in the thick textures. While listening to this recording, we fall into a musical process, unprovoked by any kind of conceptual or stylistic predeterminants. It is pure meditation outside of any individual affect or emotion. However, this meditation carries in itself certain cult elements and shades of ritual that allow one to draw an analogy with Ethnic music. Possibly, any “meditation in sound” (and that’s just how I would describe the style of Batagov’s album) will give rise to the impression of some kind of cult of ritual, as well as any logical reasoning about Absolute reality that we traditionally consider philosophy. |
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