Electric Percussions Orchestra

Life sometimes brings its own surprises. At a Raja Yoga workshop in 2018, I gave the album “Traces of Life” to a friend who is the director of the live music programme in the Danish school network. He liked our work and put us in touch with his Indian friend Rishab Prasanna who also liked our music. Rishab Prasanna is a very well known Bansuri flautist in India. Living in France, he is used to collaborating with other musical forms.

We corresponded and an idea for a new piece was born. Until now, EPO was essentially oriented towards rhythms from Africa and its diaspora (Brazilian, Cuban, Venezuelan, West Indian music…) through the use of percussion. Nevertheless, the desire to meet other sound worlds was already there. It seemed natural to us to encounter a thousand-year-old music such as traditional Indian music with its complex rhythmic characteristics (odd rhythms, long cycles…) as other artists we listen to had done before us (Charlie Mariano, Shakti, and more recently Zakir Hussain and Dave Holland…).

So the question was to design a playground between these two worlds. A world where these two approaches to improvisation could meet, complement each other, confront each other and collide to build a sort of “third way”. But we still had to invent a framework, a setting for this creation.

It was then that the theme of the journey imposed itself, whether it be geographical or interior, personal or musical.  The idea of a journey, of passage, but also of meeting oneself and the other. The Self within the other and the other within the Self.

This quartet will play new compositions based on this project and its instrumentation.

To be a little more explicit, “The Great Journey” is intended as a musical creation, an allegory of the soul’s journey from its human state to its “supracosmic” state. It is, of course, an imaginary work, as we do not claim to know all the states that we will describe below, but which refer to the writings of Raja Yoga. All the pieces in the programme are all new compositions, and  here is what they refer to

The call: the inner voice manifests itself and tries to be heard, by Man

The awakening (7 beats): The little voice inside has been heard, now we have to find a path to start the journey

The 13 points (13 beat): Man, to complete his evolution (revolution?), must pass from point 1 to point 13. These points are like energy nodes, Chakras.

The 5 circles of Maya (Illusion) (5 beat): correspond to the first five points, i.e. the heart region (Pin Pradesh)

The Liberation is in the Hindu (but also Buddhist) tradition the end of the cycle of reincarnations

The 11 circles of the ego (11 beat), correspond to the points located from 6 to 12, they belong to the region of the Bramanda Mandal (cosmic), for the first and to the Supra Bramanda Mandal (supracosmic region for the last)

The 7 rings of splendour (7 beat) correspond to point 13 and are also called Central Region

All this will serve as basic material to explore the complex rhythms of India, some specific “modes” and above all will be the starting point for our collective exchanges and improvisations.