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THE NEW TIMES OF INDIA: DRUMS &TABLA CONNECTION
A music project for east-west integration
by Riccardo Misto, italian musician and musictherapist

Main aspect of this project is the improvement of intercultural exchange between eastern and western musical approach, with a particular attention to Indian subcontinent area. It’s a long time that Hindustani and Carnatic music play an important role in the fusion process with west: from the first echoes present in some 60’pop music hits (Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones ecc.) to the deep and more articulated contamination, in a jazz key, realized by pioneer of fusion, John McLaughlin, with his group Shakti and, recently, with the recordings made in Chennai, where we can hear the young lions of Indian music, you can see how stimulating and interesting may be the dialogue between the two cultures. All this innovative ferment you find in the tracks of the new McLaughlin work “Floating Point”, where you can listen to very interesting east-west contaminations.
The very new aspect of the modern musical dialogue between west and India is the great mastering of harmonic structures that some Indian musician are showing, yet keeping live and present their legacy with the classical roots of Raga. We can say that now the dialogue between the two worlds is more equal and complete: if in the past the Indian musician were the teachers, now we can see how they are more interested to western culture and instruments: starting from the typical drum set, going through synth keyboards and the modernisation of others (guitar and sitar, in the new transformation in zitar, elettrified and played in a very close-to-guitar way by Niladri Kumar).

THE PROJECT
Starting from this mixing and reciprocal influence, the project “The New Times of India” promotes the meeting and the cultural exchange moving just from that instrument, the western drumset, which among all, is the most distant from Indian musical tradition (strongly rooted in tabla, mridangam, pakhawaj and gatham, the typical percussions), but in which are more and more interested the Indian musicians sensitive to contamination between the two cultures.
The program will be articulated in two main directions, one with a didactic/divulger character, and another more specifically musical.
The musical proposal is based on "Tabla & Drums Connection" program, where the classical indian “Raga” is enriched and developed with the use of drum set, in constant dialogue and interaction with the tabla. By this way, yet in the respect of classical tradition, the expressive possibilities are enlarged, making a fusion of two different percussive sets , and so creating a further east-west bridge.
Drum set is the propulsive motor of western music (pop, rock or jazz), and its articulated set allows the use of all player’s physical structure, getting coordinated movements of upper and lower limbs.

The final phase of this project will be a series of live performances, in which will be presented the different way of playing the drums in various contexts (western music, classical raga, fusion music and musictherapy setting). The program, in the spirit of a 360 degrees communication, will find application as in Europe as in India, with Berlin as a starting point, and the sitar of Christian Nocon, the tabla of Mario Molle and the tanpura of Silvia Refatto. Then it will spread around, also with the precious help of Partho Sarothy, intelligent and mindopened to sperimentation musician and oriented to the meeting of different cultures.

All this project will be documentated in a musical CD. There will be also a DVD with a booklet in which will be resumed all the working phases, from the starting idea to the final products.

The Sound of Gaia

Published in spanish at: Especial Hofmann (CAÑAMO, co-produced by La Liebre de Marzo)

My personal experience in the use of the entheogen like a D.J. and musician, came soon, in discotheques and rave parties, without didjeridoo nor instruments. The spirit of discovering, the turntables and the frenetic beats took me to the LSD, MDMA and those synthetics that were so common in the 90’s. I remember how my firsts trips begun
to make me think about qüestions that I never had before, so my interest on the knowledge in psychedellic substances and their uses incremented with all the information that I was able to reach. In this little text, congratulating A. Hofmann in his centenary, I’ll try to explain how A. Hofmann’s invention, and it’s posteriors studies have influenced my musical formation.

A nice morning, after the celebration of one of the bigest european rave, Borealis, and less surprised every time for the new musical tendencies, I got in contact with the didjeridoo. The city was almost a desert, so it was early
Sunday morning, and in a silent square called my attention the sound of a nomad musician making sounds with a didjeridoo. The acid I had taken the night before, together with the wet surface of the stone, in that square of Montpellier, everything was perfect for good acustics. My body got filled with that sound that penetrate to me, calling me from very far, envolving my conciousness.

A new urban tribe, in part rooted in the hippies that had taken the first LSD drops, rebirth in the 90’s, with a psychedellic label for the electroni music: the Trance. Coming from Goa’s (India) concept of music, it spread around Europe and Spain, thru Ibiza, with the influence of travellers from all over the world.
Unique festivals, like the cybernethic from Josa de Cadí (Pirinees) or Canet Rock (the most importants in Catalan psychedellics from the 70’s), would be replaced by raves and comercial
techno festivals (like Barcelona’s Sonar), where you cannot lisen to more than electronics. Hipnotic rythms, searching the extasis, with more or less power, for hours and hours, would make difficult (if not impossible), to integrate a lisergic experience.
However we will find that part of this music it’s being composed, according to the mentality aquired thru the chage of vision produced by the entheogenic, in it’s different variants. Intuitively, we can find the effects that people seach in substances, and the different substances used by the consumers of that music, used for many productions that apear in
electronic music (techno, house, techno-trance): aspects more or less riches in the music, composition, inspiration, or the productive work in the sound, like for example X-Dream, Hallucinogen or Shpongle.
But with the time I proved how the naturality of the enthogenic effects produced by those substances, gets a deeper dimension using live music, or more real music. This new music, usable in the sessions to guide modified state of conciousnes, how I understand it, enriches from the different cultures and what trascends from them: the sacred, the spiritual, the misticism, and it’s multiple forms. This can be observed, for example, in the listening of Arvo Pärt, Vidya Rao, Stephan Micus. And progressively we qüestion those values that difine us social and culturally, when we reflexion of the impact produced by the discovering of the entheogenic by the occidental society.
Thanks to the wep created around the discovering of the LSD, the work in psychiatry and psicology based in the use of this kind of substances, it has been possible a rebirth of the ancestral healing forms, at the same time that inovative. This carried me to study the musicotherapeutic methodology developed by P. Hess, founded in the clinical and ritual use of the arcaic instruments, based in the perinatal matrices, descrive by S. Grof, coming from essays and psicotherapy with LSD.
In the way thru time and spece of Gaia, we will find that some music and some instruments, for it’s quality, are more usefull than others to guide modified states of counciousnes, thru
the use of entheogens, respiration, or just music. The arcaic sound is that used during thousands of years, and thru different cultures and rites, and it’s made from a big quantity of armonic sounds, produced by the selective reproduction of freqüencies, like with instruments such as gong, didjeridoo, or voice, using the multiple possibilities of resonance. It is proved that with some instruments we can induce to  deeper states of counciosnes. With the low and continuous sound of the didjeridoo, and it’s richness of overtones that come out of it, what
also hapens with Tabla or Tampura, we can reproduce a similar enviroment that we percieved in our perinatal lives. The extense work that has been done in the field of the psychedellic in the last decades, defenetly served as a catalizer for certain aweking in peoples mind. There is a qüestioning of the stablished patrons (values), and based in the disponible information we can obtain a wider point of view. Diferent disciplines, like medicine, music, and rituals, fusion in this aweking in the occidental world, in the same time that new
values are being stablished in our society. The investigation work, and the recuperation of ancestral and new medical uses of the entheogen had been in big part tge propulsors of this change, and this qüestioning of the stablished values, of who are we and where do we go.

Thank's Peter! (in the picture: tabla family) Joel Olivé