We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience. Most of these are essential and already present.
We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits. Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
Special 25% discount on all Mode Records items for members until Sunday at midnight!
play
Out of stock
Best of 2015

SunPath

Dream Music

Label: Leaving Records

Format: 2 x Tape

Genre: Experimental

Out of stock

Matthew David’s Leaving follows up on his own recent ambient meanderings (the excellent Mindflight LP) with this special double cassette presentation of privately-issued New Age/Psychedelic gems from 1980 and 1984, revived and reissued The two tapes are duplicated exactly as they were originally released, with 6-panel j-cards containing extensive liner notes. The tapes are bundled in a midnight blue & gold sleeve, and come with immediate digital download. SunPath is the 1980s outsider New Age music of nomadic journeyman Jeff Berry. Self-released and selectively distributed around the southwest United States in the early 80s, the coveted material is now seeing the light of sun for the first time since its genesis years. Currently living in rural Wyoming, Jeff reflects on the Dream Music to Leaving Records:

“In 1980 several unique events prompted me to jump from the edge of my known world into other spaces and other places… during the early 1980’s each year I chose a vision or theme and created a work of music based upon it. One of the many things that made working on the SunPath music compositions so interesting and compelling is that in order to evoke visual images I would spend considerable time searching for specific sounds. To do that I constructed many different kinds of instruments and devices – the following details some of this process and how I combined these acoustical sounds electronically to create a blend of music not really describable from either medium – all treated with experimental tape-transferring to induce artifact and generation of overtone sequences.

detail

*Prophet synthesizer *Silver flute electronically processed *Peyote ceremony water drum *Self-built & chromatically cut glass *Aluminum and brass chime bars *Bass viol *Self built wire-strung harp *Rebuilt/retuned cedar flute *Mexican dove ocarina *Chromatically tuned sitar *Field recordings of two Colorado streams: one outdoors & one inside a cave *A field recording of a raging snowstorm captured under a full moon outside of the cabin window *Divine intervention

In the years that followed, I became more acutely aware of walking upon the borderline of other dimensions of reality. Even as I write at this moment if I step outside into the snow and look at a single pine needle or twig, it glows and shimmers as if flickering in and out of the solid reality we most normally inhabit. Everything in the natural world has this quality and I am most perplexed and astounded at every moment of my being.”

detail

Details
Cat. number: LR085-86
Year: 2016
Notes:

Edition of 150

Cassette 1, Side 1, taken from Rythm and Bliss 1982.
Cassette 1, Side 2, Recorded live at the South East Spiritual Conferences (SESC) in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1983.
Connecting with the Inner Healer Through Music, 1983. (Tracks #5-10; 1 hr, 28 min.) Five movements of “Trance Celestial” are from Laraaji’s 1982 self-release Rhythm and Blues. “Connecting with the Inner Healer Through Music” was created as support listening music for a full-day workshop by the same name at South East Spiritual Conferences (SESC) in Greensboro, NC, 1983.

Cassette 2
Lotus Collage, 1978. (Tracks #1-2; 59 min.) Recorded with a freestyle open tuned electric zither and harp. “One of my first home electric zither recordings, recorded live in a Park Slope, Brooklyn living room during my street performer/busker years in the late 1970s.” – Laraaji.

Cassette 3
Unicorns in Paradise, 1981. (Tracks #3-4; 1 hr, 4 min.) Recorded with Casiotone MT-70 electric keyboard and an open tuned zither harp. Described as, “Flowing atmospheric improvisation, inspired by trance imagination; an ideal habitat in another dimension of timelessness.”