This is a fresh remix of the original Mandarin Sky It has a pleasing sense of spacious melancholy that is set up, right at the start with the bansari flute followed by mandarin tones, heavily spiced with the last rays of the day. It reminds me of Jon Dowland after a big night on the lute. Enjoy Mandarin Sky – oil on canvas by Stephen Fearnley Stephen Fearnley is an award-winning filmmaker, artist and composer. He composes transformational soundscapes for the journeys of One Mind Live – a unique worldwide online group meditation community. To sample One Mind Live, go HERE
Song for Judy-Composer’s Choice by Stephen Fearnley
*Screen shot of instrumental layers : Song For Judy A few weeks ago I had a beautiful email from a member thanking me for the music I make. I was so touched that this month’s composer’s choice is composed and dedicated to Judy. In my email I replied: “… when I was 12 …I would play sustained, slow, ambient, Erik Satie/ dreamy Debussy-esque improvs to put my dad to sleep. He saw this as a very good investment in my music lessons! So, it goes way back, and I think this process was also dropping my own brainwave-states as well- and then Id record and play and speak on a cassette player, my own meditations.” My whole aim is to slow down the heart rate and drop your brainwave state as well as to take you on a journey. As a process, I imagine that I’m flying over an ever-changing landscape. These compositions are multi layered with interweaving layered sounds (polyphony- thankyou J.S.Bach) and I tend to get the whole structure down in the first sitting. Because I’ve been meditating for years, I can go into deeper brain states and still be composing/awake and I think the elevated ‘flying place’ placeSong for Judy-Composer’s Choice by Stephen Fearnley
Slow Rain and a Spot of Unity Consciousness by Stephen Fearnely
This months composer’s choice is an exploration of choral music. I was keen to layer a polyphony of ‘voices’ loosely based and hardly recognisable on the chord structure of the Righteous Brother’s Unchained Melody. Not that I was feeling particularly righteous. But I was thinking, that Unchained Melody reminded me of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord and then the penny dropped: Nya Ha ! Both songs are prayers and there was my choral “devotional music “ connection. Major Key – Major Lift Everyone knows that Unchained Melody is a song of longing, deep, deep, longing. The way its delivered is clearly a love song for union with one’s beloved but it also doesn’t take much of a shift, to sing it as a prayer, seeking union with one’s sense of the Divine. A sense that one’s true home is Unity: Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea To the open arms of the sea Yes, lonely rivers sigh, “Wait for me, wait for me I’ll be coming home, wait for me” And then it just takes a comma after “God” to shift the focus of the song to missing one’s lover, to a direct statement to the Divine “speedSlow Rain and a Spot of Unity Consciousness by Stephen Fearnely
Blue Lotus (After Tomita) by Stephen Fearnley
There is one very big influence on my electronic musical compositions for One Mind Live: Isao Tomita. In the 1970’s I was knocked out by his breakthrough LP called Snowflakes are Falling : “Virtuoso Electronic Performances of Debussy’s Tone Paintings”. Tomita said that his big influence was western classical music: “I thought I was listening to music from outer space,” but for this wide-eared Anglo Celtic kid of 15, when I heard his Debussy arrangements I was transported back to a childhood filled to the brim with Japanese aesthetics (loads of art books at home) and of course Japanese cartoons. Lots of Japanese cartoons. (It is only now, as I read about Tomita’s death in 2016 that he composed the theme for Kimba the White Lion!) So Tomita was always there in my life and as far as I was concerned he was from outer space. His work opened up a life-long love affair with electronic music especially Tangerine Dream, Eno and Stockhausen. Somehow, such is the mash-up of my mind, all these confluences have produced Blue Lotus, which sounds nothing like Debussy, but could be, with your eyes closed, a Japanese garden in the snow glimmering with layered referencesBlue Lotus (After Tomita) by Stephen Fearnley