NativeDSD Founders Jared and Jonas Sacks invited Meditation and Singing Bell Artist Leonie Schuurman (Body & Sound Sister) to our recording studio for the album Singing Bells Meditation.

With the streets quiet and the sky looming on an otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon during an hours session Stereo, 5 Channel Surround Sound and Binaural Pure DSD 256 recordings were created.

We recommend to lie down if possible using headphones (best with the Binaural version) or speakers. Start with some deep and calm breathing. Make sure you are comfortable. It is nice to maybe remind fellow house-mates or family that you will be ‘offline’ for the next hour and ask them not to disturb you. If you are into scents or candles, this is the time to light them!

Begin by playing the meditation sounds and focus on understanding which frequencies resonate best with your body. As you immerse yourself, you’ll start to feel as if you’re floating on waves, gently carried by the resonating frequencies. In this state of pure bliss, you’ll find yourself eagerly awaiting the return of those harmonious tones.

Bells have a toning effect that offers therapeutic relief to the body such as muscle tension release, improved concentration and overall positivity as well as reducing stress, improving sleep quality, boosting immunity, or increasing creativity. The Tibetan Brass Meditation Bells used in this recording are free standing bells. Ringing a Bell helps you change your mind state if you feel that your thoughts are drifting away from the present moment. Once you ring the bell, your mind becomes re-focused on the “now”.

Enjoy!

Leonie Schuurman, Singing Bells Artist

The post Singing Bells Meditation [Pure DSD] appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

Tones: 8 Crystal Bowls is a collection of works by artist and healer Zoana performed on Singing Bowls, Chimes and Cymbals.

Recorded and released in Pure Stereo DSD 256 by engineers Doug Fearn, George Hazelrigg and Geoff Hazelrigg, these largely improvised meditations are offered to transport the listener to a deep, restful state where harmonious vibrations become an emotional and spiritual guide. We invite you to join us on this journey.

“The Golden thread through my Life-journey has been exploring play, literally and metaphorically, infusing play with more meditative practices. The combination of artist, life-partner, mother as well as being both a student and teacher of 40 years of attuning to practices of peaceful effort has allowed me to harness more joy. I am sharing this expanding joy now within multiple modalities of listening to Wellness. The Singing Crystal Bowls are a part of this sharing.”– Zoana

Zoana – Singing Bowls, Chimes & Cymbals

The post Tones: 8 Crystal Bowls [Pure DSD] appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

It is Exclusively Available in Stereo Pure DSD 256 as well as Stereo DSD 512, DSD 128 and DSD 64 at NativeDSD.

Recorded during the early days of the Covid pandemic, this extraordinary audio document provides a rare glimpse into the purity of the natural world, free from the distractions of automobiles, trains and commercial aircraft.

Rather than resulting in an eerie silence, the forests of rural Pennsylvania were filled with the glorious sounds of multitudes of birds singing, chattering and conversing. Seeing this as a (hopefully) once in a lifetime opportunity, famed audio equipment designer and recording engineer Doug Fearn set up his equipment and captured this performance over the course of two spring mornings in May, 2020.

Recorded Direct to Stereo DSD through two channels of Doug Fearn-designed D.W. Fearn vacuum tube microphone preamplifiers. This audiophile experience is sonically engaging, emotionally stirring and historically unique.

Doug Fearn joined David Hopkins on a podcast for our Meet the Magicians interview series. This album was discussed heavily during the interview. Check it out HERE.

The post Spring Birds: An Audiophile Recording Experience from Doug Fearn [Pure DSD] appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

The album is exclusively available in Stereo DSD 512, DSD 256 and DSD 128 from NativeDSD.

As long as music has existed it has been known to have spiritual and even healing powers. The group Space Master Silence was started as a musical search party, traveling headfirst into the uncharted land of music, emotion and spirit.

The music on this album introduces a relative new instrument, the PANArt hang, an instrument with unique sonic qualities: “Being a percussionist and a drummer I always approached rhythm in a very melodious way. When I encountered the Hang in 2000 in Bern, Switzerland, I suddenly had a percussive instrument with nine different notes, together creating a scale. Every Hang is unique and has its own scale and sound quality.The Hang embodies all three important elements of music.” –

Joshua Samson – PANArt hang & Percussion
Andre Heuvelman – Trumpet & Flugelhorn
Frans de Rond – Interactive Recording & Electronics

The post Where We Met appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

Later on, in solo performances and concerts, I gave more and more room to free improvisation, in addition to written compositions. I felt that music could not express itself more honestly and directly through me. When sounds are being born, when they are being created, there is nothing but the here and now. It is then that I am closest to the creative force that I am trying to convey with my instrument. This is similar to the way I paint – also improvised – my method, state of mind and emotion, the image evolves and changes as I respond to it. When sharing my images online, my favourite hashtag is “secret places in my mind”. With my paintings and music, I seek out the undiscovered places of my thoughts and feelings, I wander around them, these are the places I like to be. It’s an exciting and a bit risky journey…

The idea for the recording came about after my solo concert at the Kiezsalon festival in Berlin, and I hadn’t originally thought of releasing an album, I just wanted to record the more abstract sound, musical style and structure that the Berlin audience could hear after the release of my first studio album. At that concert, I felt a kind of very intense attention, which was very inspiring in itself, and the feedback was soul-stirring, somehow everyone was overcome by a joy that took me by surprise. After I came back, the plan to make a record of the recording was soon formed. The studio concert as a genre was a very good medium for Unseen Landscapes, and the love and attention of the small audience contributed greatly to the content of the album. Meanwhile, in the spring I had the opportunity to have a solo exhibition in a gallery in Buda in the autumn. This opportunity was also very inspiring, it was exciting to put together a coherent body of work over the months. Before I started painting three years ago, I took photos – two exhibitions were put together from my images – albeit only with my phone and while running, my subject was nature with a kind of fairy-tale filter. In that sense, the subject is the same now, but this time I’m showing landscapes that you couldn’t otherwise see. So the record and the pictures were made at the same time, impressions of the same point of view, formed by different means. I basically paint abstract landscapes, I feel the plate and the images correlate, slowly building strong moods, mysteries, abstract transformations, expansive horizons.”

Luca Kézdy – violin

The post Unseen Landscapes [Pure DSD] appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

We include music like the world famous “Estrellita” by Ponce, Ravel’s famous “Pavane” in a rare but very effective guitar arrangement. From the “12 Songs” by Toru Takemitsu, Maruri has selected 6, including “Summertime” by George Gershwin, “Over the Rainbow” by Harold Arlen, “Secret Love” by Sammy Fain, “Londonderry Air”, the beloved Irish folk song, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney “Michelle” and “Yesterday” each of them rewritten in the unique musical language of the great Toru Takemitsu.

We present a guitar version of “El día que me quieras” by Carlos Gardel composed by the great Argentinian guitar tango player Anibal Arias. “Terry’s Theme” by Charlie Chaplin is also included, Osvaldo Farrés, “Quizás, quizás, quizás”, Agustín Lara , “Solamente una vez” and Henry Mancini’s “Sunflower”.

Following these unforgettable melodies we return to the guitar world with the intimate and personal style of Yuquijiro Yocoh and his unmistakable “Sakura variations” and just to remind ourselves that he wrote other pieces beside this, we present his “Old Irish Song”. In a programme such as this we couldn’t exclude the beautiful “Alfonsina y el mar” by Ariel Ramirez.

Agustín Maruri, Guitar

The post Guitar Love Songs appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

At the risk of getting doxxed by my musician colleagues, I’m going to divulge a dark truth about classical music: it’s never as captivating or molecule-altering for anyone as it is for us on stage.

Which is why I often find classical records, especially those of the orchestral persuasion, so underwhelming. So not…immediate. Which is why I am approaching zealot status in my admiration for Sono Luminus and the way in which it submerges listeners within reach of the Atlantis that is the on-stage experience. Which is why, save for live performance, the often inimitable new-music originating in, or in proximity to, Iceland (homeland to an unreasonable percentage of the composers living rent-free in my headphones for more than a decade) has found its most ardent advocate and most clarion amplifier in Winchester, Virginia. Certainly its exceptional national orchestra has.

Despite a bewildering insistence by journalists to characterize music written by those with Icelandic surnames as a monolith, the entries on this track list are as singular as hand blown glass. The inclusion of American sonic clairvoyant Missy Mazzoli is a helpful geographic foil here, but there is one element fusing all of these inventions: Your person is about to feel minuscule or massive, by contrast to – or motivated by – these sounds.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is often intimidatingly cyclopean, and Catamorphosis at times mimics the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft-ian deities, but it simultaneously introduces an iridescent hope I have not encountered before in her music. Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) catapults us from one end of a pulsing solar system to the other while Daníel Bjarnason’s From Space I Saw Earth improbably stretches perspective from earth to the moon and back, seeming somehow both terrestrial and paranormal within a single phrase. Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir’s Clockworking bridges a similar expanse, coexisting within the measurable realm of time-keeping… and the immeasurable realm of what occurs as the seconds tick by. Is Bára Gísladóttir’s ÓS gasping in air, or desperately exhaling? Whatever your observation, and as with every waypoint on this illusory itinerary, the answer is likely: both.

Iceland Symphony Orchestra
Daníel Bjarnason, Conductor

The post Atmospheriques appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

Avenel’s Malian and Gambian bandmates performed with Yakhouba Sissokho (kora), Lansiné Kouyaté (balafon, a marimba), Moriba Koita (ngoni, a lute), and Michel Edelin (flutes). The band has traditional music in their bones and an openness to experiments. French flutist Michel Edelin provides a second jazz voice on many tracks. Avenel’s beautiful bass sound and rhythmic vitality spur the band on, the overall vibe is sweet, intense, and joyful, and the delicious blend of timbres is perfectly caught by this Stereo and 5 Channel Surround Sound Pure DSD recording.

Avenel explained the group’s origins:

“My interest in African music, its rhythmic richness, its sonorities, developed with my study of the sanza [thumb piano] and then the kora (and its repertoire). The idea of blending the double bass with these instruments is an old dream which was sketched out on my solo record Eclaircie (1985). Meeting Yakhouba I owe to Phillipe Conrath, who invited us to perform at the Africolor Festival in 1997. This was a fruitful encounter, and we decided to continue. Yakhouba became my kora teacher, my friend and musical partner. Through him I met Moriba and Lansiné. The basic trio: Yakhouba, Lansiné and me. Sometimes Moriba replaces Lansiné; joined by Michel Edelin (2000).

“[This music] is a meeting of individuals, a sharing of knowledge and passions, a desire to open things up and a respect for tradition. (Structured) improvisation is our playing field. The essential thing in this music is play, where the pleasure of playing is collective. The music is created around themes (introduced by one or the other of us) and improvisations on the harmonic structures (very simple) and rhythmic structures. The different ways of playing (traditional or a more modern approach) are expressed in a collective exchange from which soloists emerge.”

Album highlights include the rhythmic excitement of Avenel’s solo composition “Pi-Pande” where he overdubs bass and kora, and then lightly adds in a second bass for color and harmony; the shifting interplay and lovely textures of n’gonis, flutes and bass on Koïta’s stately tune “Batou Kagni”; the Caribbean insouciance and subtle orchestration of “Jarabi”; the ensemble groove with its figure/ground interchange of solos and riffs in “Kaïra”; and the sophisticated syncopations and accents that balance the touching simplicity of the classic “Tubaka.”

Waraba
Jean-Jacques Avenel – Double Bass & Kora
Yakhouba Sissokho – Kora
Lansiné Kouyaté – Balafon
Moriba Koïta – N’goni
Michel Edelin – Flute, Alto Flute, Bass Flute

The post Waraba [Pure DSD] appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

Available in Stereo & 5.1 Channel Surround Sound DSD & DXD plus 7.0.4 Channel Immersive Auro3D 96k FLAC, 7.0.4 Channel Auro3D & Dolby Atmos TrueHD MKV & 7.0.4 Channel Discrete Immersive Audio.

The meditation on the two words common to both Jewish and Christian traditions for two thousand years reach into the sound world of Trio Mediæval, weaving their music into a thread first spun more than half a millennium ago.

Trio Mediæval

NOTICE: For the time being, Dolby Atmos MKV dowloads are provided as direct download dropbox links and are not available for download through the downloader app. The download link will be supplied at checkout.

The post alleluia amen (Meditation Remix) [DSD EP] appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

TRPTK says “you could say this is our most immersive project yet. In Suspended Animation, by Dark Cinder Veneer is out now! Immerse yourself in a deep, dark ocean of synths, pads and textures.”

Using a minimalist approach, the album travels in the limbo that exists between music and sound. The chord drones surrounded by slow, evocative hints of melody, harmony and sparse sprinkles of spacious sound, take you deep inside and simultaneously far out there.

The idea behind in suspended animation is the journey one takes through both dreams and fears. How does one overcome subconscious blockades and release oneself back into the life you want to live?

Travel safe in sound.

Dark Cinder Veneer

The post In Suspended Animation appeared first on NativeDSD Music.