A great way to start the new year is to check out Jordan De La Sierra’s Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose from 1976. About the album Randall Davis writes:
In the world of experimental, explorational, ambient/new-age/neo-classical music, something very special has happened. One of the inspirational and influential “lost classics” has re-emerged. In 1976, multi-dimensional artist Jordan De La Sierra sat at a specially-tuned piano and recorded Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose. The original vinyl album has been out-of-print for more than 30 years. Now the recording has been released for the first time on CD, digitally-remastered from the original tapes. The legend continues.
This historic music is finally available again — now as a two-CD set, as a double-vinyl-album and as digital downloads — thanks to a careful reissue by Numero Group, a specialty label based in Chicago. The package includes a 20-page booklet with extensive information about the project and its history as well as India-inspired drawings and De La Sierra’s musings on “the tableau of space.” More information about the project is available at http://numerogroup.com/products/jordan-de-la-sierra-gymnosphere-song-of-the-rose
There are several reasons this music is so coveted. The music itself is exceptional, emotion-stirring and timeless, although it also originally was considered cutting edge, ground-breaking and influential to other musicians (it was one of the first acoustic-ambient recordings). Remarkably, it sounds completely contemporary to this day. In addition, De La Sierra was always a leader in the field of modern sonic-art, avant-garde, psycho-acoustic, new frontier music. He studied with (and became a good friend of) legendary minimalist musician Terry Riley, Indian classical singer and Kyhal master Pandit Pran Nath, forward-thinking teachers Robert Ashley and Bill Maraldo at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, La Monte Young, and Tantric-Sufi teachers Harish Johari and Tariq Hamid. And finally, Gymnosphere was co-produced by De La Sierra with Stephen Hill, founder and creator of the popular international radio show Hearts of Space. The music was originally released on the esoteric, independent, but soon-legendary Unity Records label.
Read the blog post on HOS.com