Meditation music is a risky business.

When my future wife witnessed my meditating session almost 19 years ago (that's how long we've been together), she said: "That's not a meditation, that's relaxation." And she was right.

She's been always much ahead of me in this field. Meditating for an hour a day for years, she's quite advanced, and she's been experiencing great results.

Me, on the other hand...

I wish I was able to stop the flow of thoughts. But that happens rarely. My mind works in the ADHD way, so when I sit down in silence, I begin getting a deluge of ideas. My friend told me once: "Imagine you're waiting at a bus stop. A bus comes. All the people around you get on the bus. You let them go. That's meditation."

Well, my bus stop people are always fascinating. There's a potential guru among them, a mysterious woman on a secret mission, an old man with many great stories from the past to tell... You get the idea.

I usually get on. The bus, I mean.

My meditations are more like mind adventures. Colorful, spectacular, insightful but entertaining at the same time. And music helps me get there. The trouble is which kind of music....

Most of the time, music designated for meditating doesn't work for me. It's either some New Age stuff, sometimes featuring piano, percussion, sometimes singing – and I often involuntarily begin paying attention to it and realize how stupid, superficial, and cheesy it is. Or it's some ambient stuff, and I start doing the same: focusing on the sounds, getting ideas how to make it better musically, and contemplating about the fact that, in case of long drones, it sounds like even the person who made it hadn't heard the whole thing in the resulting speed, because otherwise they wouldn't dare releasing it... Just yesterday I got a notification about a new album featuring 10 (yes, ten) hours of drones, and the idea itself made me uncomfortable.

Each of us has a different taste, and it's possible that none of my dear fans see it the way I see it – but anyway: My best kind of meditative music is music that makes me feel like I'm alone in the deep space, in comfortable sleeping quarters with a beautiful view of the stars and planets surrounding the spaceship (something like the artwork of my Deep Sleep Leap album), excited about the future far from everything and everyone familiar, left to my devices – the devices being, hopefully, perfectly functioning technology taking care of my air, temperature, gravity, meal supply, and well-being in general. Too much sci-fi literature in my teens I guess, but that's my idea of a meditation that works for me. Space adventure, baby.

This album complies with my needs and requirements for meditation music. Its individual tracks are comfortably repetitive musically but ever-chainging sonically, they're long enough to not interrupt my flow of thoughts and visions but short enough to keep my attention, and they sound like something made on advanced extra-terrestrial technology but found centuries later, worn out in the meantime.

Conceptually I took inspiration from the seven stages of meditation that can be found here:
www.snsociety.org/the-seven-stages-of-meditation/

That determined the names of the individual tracks, and their order. I prefer the story of the album to be told in this particular sequence, but if a different succession of the tracks works for you, hoorah.

Also... I prefer gapless playback of the individual compositions, one blending with another smoothly, that's why the first half of the album is a continuous playback of the mixed-together tracks. But if one changes the order, they need separate recordings with gaps, and that's why the second half of the album is comprised of the same tracks not intermingling each other.

The release day of this album is May 1. That's because this day combines – intermingles, blends, mixes... – three relevant international days: Global Love Day, celebrating love and unity, and reminding us of the fact we are all interconnected and our individual actions impact the world around us; National Blessing Day, dedicated to recognizing and appreciating the blessings we have in our lives, the time to express gratitude for all the positive aspects of our lives; and National Mantra Day, encouraging us to repeat our mantras, or sacred chants, in order to invoke positive energy.

I hope my new music will help you meditate on some of the above or something entirely different, and that it will enable you repeatedly enter either the desired or unexpected states of mind. Even if it works "merely" as music for you, I'm happy.

Thank you for reading this, thank you for listening, and thank you for supporting independent musicians – you are everything we have in this world, in a way, and we appreciate you from the bottom of our hearts.

Jan aka Binaural Space, April 27, 2024 (pre-release day)