The Harmonic Choir - Hearing Solar Winds

From CD Baby:

Twenty-five years have passed since the hot, hazy summer night in Provence when David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir sat together in the Thoronet Abbey and created their remarkable recording of Hearing Solar Winds.

Twenty-five years is an eternity in the world of music. An entire generation comes of age in that time, bringing with it new currents of musical taste and style. Rare is the work that speaks to successive generations with an abiding freshness and feeling of revelation that endures after repeated listening. "Hearing Solar Winds" is such a work.

Two-and-a-half decades after its first release, it still offers an astonishing window into a different world of perception. It deserves to be regarded as a key work of the late twentieth century, both for the originality of its vision, and for the abiding influence that its revelatory approach to working with sound has had on diverse communities of musicians and artists, not to mention a broader circle of scientists and seekers, healers and musicians.

David Hykes was himself influenced by many kinds of music, notably the overtone-singing traditions of Mongolia, Tibet and Tuva, which were far less known in the 1970s and early 1980s than they are today. Yet Hearing Solar Winds represents not a simulacrum of Tuvan or Mongolian overtone singing, but the product of a global sensibility inspired by music's most powerful universal: the harmonic series.

Just as Tuvan and Mongolian overtone singing are rooted in the natural environment of mountains and grasslands that the south Siberian herders hold sacred, the Harmonic Chant of Hearing Solar Winds evolved in the environment of sacred indoor spaces, including New York City's neo-gothic St. John the Divine Cathedral, where the Harmonic Choir was in residence from 1979 until 1989, and the Thoronet Abbey. The Choir's music is perfectly suited to these spaces, which bring to life both the literal and metaphorical harmony created by well-tuned overtones.