Music Arcades: Laraaji: Ambient #3

Speaking of devotional music and Eno, here's an album from the early '80s that brings the two together. As with yesterday's album, the first half has some energy to it while the the second half is much slower and has no beats. Side 1 (as it would have been on the original LP release) has three tracks called The Dance, which is kind of like gamelan music but played on the dulcimer (or something like it). Side 2 has two quieter tracks called Meditation. In iTunes the genre of all these tracks shows up as 'New Age' and, in its day, this album may have been seen as an early example of that deservedly-mocked school. I think it makes more sense to see it as a continuation of the spiritual music of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders (and, to a lesser extent, John McLaughlin) from the '70s.

Laraaji seems an enigmatic figure. He did this album in 1980, and there are no sleeve notes. I didn't think he'd done a follow-up for fifteen years or so after that — certainly his profile more or less vanished — though his Wikipedia entry suggests he was making music more or less consistently.

I first came across him through Laraaji's track on First Edition, but this was the last of the four albums in Eno's Ambient series that I bought (#1, #4). It was just a case of filling out my collection when I got for a fiver on 25 February 2004, the same day I got my Charley Patton and Lemon Jelly albums, among others.

I'm sure this music sounds very different to 2007 ears compared with how 1980 ears must have heard it — another case of the alien and weird becoming almost over-familiar.