Sound's Seeds

Sound’s Seeds

in the autumn of power

martino nicoletti, © 2006

The Project

The Sound’s seeds project – created by Dr. Martino Nicoletti, national coordinator of the anthropological section of the Ev-K²-CNR Association Committee, with the collaboration of Roberto Passuti, musician and sound engineer – focuses on the collection of a series of Asiatic ritual music and songs, through a strict selection of cultural contexts in which, even today, music is considered to have a specific sacred nature and a peculiar magic power.   

    
It provides a deeper glance at those traditions where music is deemed to have the unusual capacity of reaching and sounding the very depths of the invisible world.
Sound as an arrow, a harpoon. An arrow aimed at the origin of things, in the direction of those creative vibrations which, at the very beginning, gave birth to the universe. A harpoon giving direct access to sources of hidden power, which provides man with the opportunity to manipulate them for his own benefit or to facilitate transformations of his own consciousness.         
The project, based essentially on digital recording of music in the field, is integrated by intense work on texts and ample visual support.

Indeed, the project purposes to publish a short series of music CDs, each with a pocket book supplement, in the form of a travel notebook, in which information about context and culture, experiences, meetings, the visual and visionary strength of selected images and the sharp power of the sound melt together to create a simple, many-facetted and – above all – living work.

This work, produced in collaboration with the label Amiata Records, is largely addressed to those who, beyond any mere interest in ethnic music, sincerely desire to taste – through a multiplicity of voices and languages – the atmosphere, the beauty and poetry of hidden faraway worlds, a desire to approach different cultures, far from any stereotype, in an attempt to understand their complexity, their evolution, their contradictions and their infinite variety.

The Path of Light

THE PATH OF LIGHT
The Musical Heritage of the Tibetan  Bon-pos 


Before Buddhism was officially introduced in Tibet, around the seventh century CE, Tibetans professed an autochthonous religion, generally known as Bon.


Despite persecutions by official Buddhism centuries ago, and much more recently by the Chinese cultural revolution, the Bon religion still survives, and has seen an extraordinary revival in the past few years thanks the indefatigable work of Tibetan refugees living in India and Nepal.
Beyond its apparent resemblance to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (especially to the ancient school of rNying-ma-pa), the Bon religion has a specific and autonomous ritual and doctrinal identity, almost wholly unknown to the western world.


From a ceremonial and ritual point of view, today’s Bon-pos preserve and hand down a very rich heritage of ritual music utilised during specific collective rituals and peculiar meditation practices.
The use of the music, based on the evocative and mantric power attributed to sound and word, transforms every performance into an invisible bridge between the individual and the depths of his own spirit.

The CD recorded in Nepal on May 2006, contains a wide selection of songs from the bon-po monastery of Triten Norbutse: the preliminary practices according to the ngondro of the Zhang Zhung snyan rgyü; some additional practices; a rare recording of the autosacrificial gcod ritual; the recitation of The Central Fulfilment of the Tsewang Rigdin’s Heart, sacred text belonging to the bon-po canon (Tenjur).




For listen click here