C. Lavender Rupture In The Eternal Realm

‘Rupture in the Eternal Realm’ is C. Lavender’s musical response to studies of the Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice known as chöd. Not an obvious interpretation, she draws on her experience working alongside Pauline Oliveros, mixing oddly tuned analog synth drones with gong sounds and field recordings. The traditional chöd form usually involves drums, trumpets bells and voice, but Lavender uses tradition as a point of departure rather than a blueprint, reflecting on her own expreience rather than the aesthetic roots of the form. The result is a gusty set of ritualistic experiments that anchor themselves in chöd chants without repeating them, including field recordings Lavender made at the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Buddhist temple in Woodstock, NY. Using Buchla 200 drones and tones from the expressive Haken Continuum Fingerboard, and fusing them with almost unrecognisable gong and voice sounds, EVI recordings and “brainwave modulating tones”, Lavender generates an immersive soundscape that dissolves between one track and the next. Driven by deep listening’s curative properties (she’s even written a book about it - ‘Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives’), Lavender avoids the usual new age pitfalls, sculpting sounds that bury themselves deep in the subconscious. It’s oozing, intensely organic material that chimes rather than throbs, obscuring gentle, lulling rhythms in glittering clouds of electro-acoustic noise.