Last week I watched one of my favourite bands, Anathema perform at The Koko, Camden Town, London. Can you imagine – being moved to tears by progressive rock music? Well – that’s Anathema for you. Their music has such a touching and other-worldly dimension to it that it really moves you. Still remember when I received their last album “Weather Systems” by post, I rushed to my music system to play it. And instantly tears started flowing down and they continued till the mindblowing last song “Internal Landscapes”. I was in a different space altogether – here and not here. Their latest album “Distant Satellites” generates a similar experience.
Watching their show is a meditational experience (they won a best live event award in 2012). You won’t find loud, drunk headbangers or mosh pits, but people swaying, their eyes closed in a meditative trance. Here are some lines I wrote about last week’s show:
Vignettes of belonging
get high on sparkling water
Unforced pretentions rooted
on sticky ground
shake into haze
float into space
Ambient north and south poles
light up the red walls
Haloed silhouettes come
back for an encore
I will never forget the first time I saw them play live (17 Feb 2011, London). First reason for that is an interesting story. I went to the show straight after work. While at work I was rushing for my last meeting and in the hurry got my leg stuck in a revolving door. It hurt but I thought was only a muscle pull or something and with a painkiller to address that, I still went ahead for the show. Stood there for the entire duration, walked back home, but in the morning I could not even get up, numbed by the pain in my leg. Diagnosis revealed two muscle tears, including a long 7 cm one. On crutches for four weeks and the leg took couple of years to heal! Lesson learnt –I never dash for things now (e.g. in the tube when the doors are closing). The other reason why I’ll never forget that show is that Anathema were simply brilliant – their energy, connectedness with the audience, their music… even did a cover of Pink Floyd “Wish you Were Here”!
When a kind of music moves and transforms me this way, I always get curious about what’s at the source – surely the creator must have had a transformational experience too. Turns out that is the case with Anathema – read in interviews that Daniel Cavanagh (co-founder, guitarist, singer) had a transformational experience in 2005 that led him to quitting alcohol/drugs and pursuing a more spiritual approach in his day-to-day life.
“Internal Landscapes”, a song about loss and love, features spoken words by Joseph Garaci, who was transformed after a NDE (Near Death Experience). Joe started to write therapeutic and meditative poems – and these became the basis for a new project “The Passage” with ambient music by Daniel Cavanagh on poems by Joseph Garaci. The poems are quite abstract, esoteric and transcendental in nature, but thought provoking and inspiring nevertheless. An example:
“Here alone I sit, so warmly wrapped in song, on rolling seas of rhyme, with notes I sail along. This melody transcends to thought and rhythm turns to time. I in being with the wind, seek all there is to find. It is on this zephyr that I soar, to seek where warmth abounds. A heart that in its pulse does keep, a secret played in rhythmic sounds. And again when I find this place of love, a place where I belong, I’ll spend each passing hour with you, till evening turns to dawn…”
I have had other experiences also when I heard some piece of music and realised that it is quite different in nature and would have come from some kind of transformational experience:
Public Symphony: I stumbled into their album and realised a lot of their songs used words like breakthrough, transformation – very Landmark-ish. I got in touch with their lead singer, Dobs, and yes – he had done the Landmark Forum (which actually started my transformation journey also 9 years back) and the band was his Self Expression and Leadership Programme project!
Yes – Songs from A Topographic Ocean: When I heard this for the first time, I thought again thatthere has to be something behind it. Browsed through the CD Notes and got my answer – the album was composed just after reading “Autobiography of a Yogi” (a masterpiece for spiritual awakening)
Spock’s Beard – Snow: Again, where different music and the got my answer to why that was so in the sleeve notes where Neal Morse (the frontman) had written “what happened was that I had just done the Landmark Forum”…
Marillion – Happiness is the Road: Marillion is another one of my favourite bands. This album was inspired by Eckhart Tolle, Power of Now, around the same time when I read it and got my spiritual side switched on.
Here’s to a beautiful world, transformed by poetry and music.
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