Here I give you the music that I’ve been discovering (with my untrained, magpie ear) and playing on loop (as a lay listener). These beautiful sounds from around the world evoke nature in original, unusual, and compelling ways. No ambient nature muzak or stereotypical sitar-in-an-Indian-restaurant type situation here.
I have refrained from including the more powerful ritual/ceremonial ones such as Vedic chants, Gyuto tantric chants, Native American chants, Amazonian icaros, Yoruba Orisha calls, etc., which are best at the right time and place, and not for everyone.
You won’t find this particular compilation anywhere else. I might add exceptional tracks here from time to time. Knock yourselves out.
Ponni Nadi & Chola Chola
Genre: OST | Lyrics: AR Rahman & (the revelation that is) Ilango Krishnan | Music: AR Rahman | Artists: AR Rahman, AR Raihanah, Bamba Bakya; Sathya Prakash, VM Mahalingam, Nakul Abhyankar | Album: Ponniyin Selvan I, 2022 & II, 2023 | Language: Tamil | Instruments: several
10th century CE. The imperial Chola dynasty is flourishing in the south of India, with its capital at fabled Thanjavur.
The fresh, wayward, loose-jointed Ponni Nadi pans over the river and lifeblood that is Kaveri (Ponni) and the golden rice harvests on her banks that the rider, having crossed dusty, parched lands, must see before the sun sets. But my favourite is the more abstract Chola Chola—exhilarating, martial, buckling at the knees from intoxication of land (and woman, and war).
Mitti di Khushboo
Genre: pop | Lyrics & Music: Rochak Kohli | Artist: Ayushmann Khurrana | Album: Single 2016 | Language: Punjabi | Instruments: several
Mitti di khushboo is petrichor (from the Greek petros, stone + ichor, ‘god-blood’), the heady scent of wet earth that rises up through the clear, crackling, green air after a thunderstorm. The scent comes from geosmin, a molecule made by the Streptomyces soil bacteria. Those of us that come undone by the monsoon, this scent is our ichor. Khurrana’s voice captures all the sweet melancholia, all the worshipful romance.
Trivia: GI-tagged Kannauj Perfumes makes one called mitti attar—earth perfume.
Flight of the Humble Bee
Genre: classical-jazz fusion | Artist: L Subramaniam (feat. Ron Wagner) | Album: Indian Express 1984 | Instrument: violin, drums
Relentless. Astonishing. One classic mad bee and nothing humble about it.
For a parallel that will make you think you’re seeing things, see the Rimsky-Korsakov Flight of the Bumblebee on Yuja Wang’s piano.
Come Along
Genre: acoustic | Artist: Jaron Lanier | Album: Instruments of Change 1994 | Instruments: suling, a Balinese flute, and esraj, a bowed string instrument from Bengal
Lanier1, better known as the father of Virtual Reality, says, “A sensitivity, and a sense of awe, at the mystery that surrounds life is at the heart of both science and art, and instruments with mandatory concepts built in can dull this sensitivity by providing an apparently non-mysterious setting for activity. This can lead to bland or ‘nerdy’ art. The physical world, however, is a fundamentally mysterious place and acoustic instruments possess bottomless depth.”
Trivia: Rabindranath Tagore once said that all students at Santiniketan should learn the esraj.
Vajra
Genre: world | Artist: David Parsons | Album: Vajra 2007 | Instruments: several
To see the Himalayas is to be changed forever. It is not easy to put it into words. But music comes close.
In the superficial froth of world and new age music, Parsons stands out as a genuine pioneer who travelled the world, studied various cultures deeply, and composed sublime music that mirrored their essence. Each album is long, deep, immersive. No one track ever breaks the spell. It probably helped that he learned sitar from Ravi Shankar in his early days.
Vajra—the thunderbolt and the indestructible diamond at the heart of the lotus—is a ritual tool that is used in Tibetan Buddhist tantric practice.
Oxygène IV & Waiting for Cousteau
Genre: progressive electronica | Artist: Jean-Michel Jarre | Albums: Oxygène 1977 & En Attendant Cousteau 1990 | Instruments: several
Oxygène is the cold, glassy, rarefied, almost-unbearable music of places very far, very high, very deep—the edges of the earth and beyond. Reinhold Messner, the great alpinist, listened to this during the first solo ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen. Part IV is a sweet intergalactic ride.
Waiting for Cousteau, the last, luscious 47min track, will take you deep underwater, to places you look at with wonder and places you do not want to go.
Khukh Tolboton
Genre: folk rock | Band: Altan Urag | Album: Mongol OST 2007 (and later Marco Polo) | Language: Mongolian | Instruments: several
Hooves thundering across endless steppes under vast blue skies and a golden sun, across the mighty mountains of the Altai and the Khanghai. Fire and water and earth. The grace of ancestors. The flip of the ‘l’ in ‘Mongol’ like a vaulting back on the horse. And the very long shadow of Chinggis Khan.
Konguroi (Sixty Horses in My Herd) & Kozhamyk
Genre: folk throat-singing | Band: Huun-Huur-Tu | Album: Ancestors Call 2010 | Language: Tuvan | Instruments: several, including actual horse hooves
Sharing a southern border with Mongolia lies Tuva in Siberia. The same landscape, yet a whole other way of being with the land and its music. Listen for the musical instruments made from actual horse hooves. Listen for the Tuvan throat-singing (singing at a base pitch and the overtones of the base pitch, at the same time) that they stridently note is ‘very different’ from Mongolian throat-singing. I saw them live once. I can attest that they changed the landscape of the chamber.
Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold
Genre: OST | Lyrics: JRR Tolkien | Composer: Howard Shore | Artists: Richard Armitage & The Dwarves | Album: The Hobbit 2012 | Language: English | Instruments: several
Tolkien was a master. I’m seduced by the words of the song. And the tune. There’s Richard Armitage’s spare, beautiful, firelit rendition. There’s Clamavi De Profundis’ lyrical, extended version. And for some fantasy upon fantasy, there is Colm R McGuiness’ version in Khuzdul (Dwarvish) metal. It does go rather theatrical in places for a bunch of dwarves and a hobbit on a hard quest.
Nesso
Genre: experimental world folk | Band: Heilung | Album: Drif 2022 | Language: Old Saxon? High German? I don’t know. | Instruments: lyre, frame drum, others
Heilung means ‘healing’ in German. Drif is a magical album. I like all the tracks—especially Asja and Anoana—but Nesso is particularly apt for this list. This track is a testament to how the human voice can move in one’s body and those of others, heal.
“Nesso is an old High German word that means ‘worm’. It goes back to the ancient belief that pain is a worm that crawls through your body or is stuck in some place in your body—and that worm could be pulled out by the medicine people of the ancient Germanic age. Luckily, we have that spell preserved in the original language. In this case, it is for the healing of the hoof or leg of a horse. Maria sings the worm out of the body there.”
Far From Any Road
Genre: folk-rock-gothic Americana | Band: The Handsome Family (Brett & Rennie Sparks) | Album: Singing Bones 2003 | Language: English | Instruments: several
I read the news and think wtf USA, and then I listen to something like this and remember what was good about it in the first place. If this incredible song sounds familiar, that’s because you heard the title track on True Detective S1 and never forgot how it made you feel.
NOTE
Check your volume before the next three tracks.
I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots
Genre: atmospheric black metal | Band: Wolves in the Throne Room | Album: Two Hunters 2007 | Language: English | Instruments: several
After everything goes up in the fire, the rain will come, and something new will be born in the forest.
“Our music invokes the Spirits that reside in the mountains and rivers—the Sun and Moon, the plants and animals. These deities have been with us since ancient times, but their voices have been drowned out in the modern world.”
Cerbera odollam
Genre: black metal | Band: Botanist | Album: I. The Suicide Tree/II. A Rose from the Dead 2011 | Language: English (with taxonomic bits in Latin) | Instrument: hammered dulcimer
Otrebor, the one-man band that is Botanist studies dictionaries of flora and fauna. Plays a hammered dulcimer. Writes very short, very weird songs that ‘grow out of the worship of the forest’ but sometimes also feature mandragora annihilating humans and taking over the earth. “When Botanist music gets recorded, I channel an entity within me that’s been named The Botanist, a character whose perspective dictates the content of the music and lyrics.”
I cannot call this trivia because of its tragic history in my part of the world: The suicide tree refers to Cerbera odollam (othalam/arali in Tamil and Malayalam) that yields a terrible poison.
L’Enfant Sauvage & The Wild Healer
Genre: progressive/technical death metal ++ | Band: Gojira | Album: L’Enfant Sauvage 2012 | Language: English | Instruments: several
Some types of metal have a natural (sorry) affinity for nature; they just express it in a way that you never think of when you think of nature, nature writing, and nature writers. Gojira has life, death, nature, spirituality, poetry. They are also environmental activists. “There is light in this world I fight for.”
L’Enfant Sauvage blazes around the central riff. The Wild Healer glides around two like an ethereal water strider on a dystopian swamp.
Theremin
Genre: out-of-this-world experimental | Inventor & Artist: Leon Theremin | Instrument: Theremin
One that shapes nature itself. Leon Theremin plays his marvellous instrument, and air itself, here in 1930, and much later, here. Like Arthur C Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
In 2001, a group of Russian teenagers sent The First Theremin Message to Aliens as part of METI (Messages for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), the art counterpart of NASA’s SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
Migaloo Whale Song
Genre: nature | Artist: Migaloo | Album: Songlines of the Whales 1998 | Language: Humpback Whale
Migaloo, the great white humpback whale—whose name comes from the First Nations word meaning ‘white fella’—was recorded singing his songs in Platypus Bay, K’gari, Australia. He was nine years old at the time. Now he appears to exist as a legendary Schrödinger’s whale—he might be alive, he might be dead, and we want and don’t want to look.
From the liner notes: “Humpback whale songs are passed down over generations and evolve in a similar fashion to the verbally transmitted tribal lore of Australian Aboriginal culture from where the term Songlines is derived. We dedicate these recordings to Uncle Lewis Walker, Aboriginal elder of the Wahrlabal tribe of the Bundjalung nation of Byron Bay. Uncle Lewis is a Keeper of the Ancient Songlines of the Whales. We honour the Ancestor Spirits of Bundjalung Country. We honour Uncle Lewis’s Dreaming Lineage and we honour Uncle Lewis’s innate understanding of the relationship between the water, the whales, the Earth and humanity. Uncle Lewis reminds us that all Earth’s creatures are our brothers and sisters.”
BONUS
Jonna Jinton’s Kulning—ancient Swedish herding call 😊
Image: Early sun falling across a street mural in Kathmandu. It shows a pensive young Tibetan woman wearing a chuba and turquoise-coral jewellery set in silver. The presence of coral at such high altitudes tells a turbulent geological story of great tectonic movements. She is walking with what’s either a baby yak or a juvenile dzo, a yak x cattle hybrid.
Any number of cha drinkers (like me), cats, tiffin deliverers, sweepers, smokers, parked motorbikes, pigeons, beggars, pilgrims, monks, dogs, loiterers (also like me) had to step out of the frame for this woman to emerge. It took days. I was carrying a bag to the laundry place and there she was. Photo © Kanya Kanchana
#nature #writing #playlist #musicreco
It was Lanier I read several years ago when I was considering quitting all social media. I quit. I’m aware of the irony of being on Substack now, but I’m trying to keep it as little like social media as I can.