LARAAJI presents The Peace Garden

Laraaji is a creator of a panegyric music of the cosmos and a firm practitioner and promotor of transcendental meditation through laughter, based out of New York. He started playing music on the streets in the 70’s, improvising hypnotic pieces on his customized zither whose sound he processes with electronic effects, informed by his personal research and interest of mystical oriental cultures. His first LP ‘Celestial Vibration’ came out in 1978 on a very small batch, under his own birth name. The following year Brian Eno saw him play on a public park and invited him to record an album for his series ‘Ambient’ (‘Ambient 3: Day of Radiance’, released in 1980). Since then Laraaji has published profusely much of his music recorded at home, selling it on cassette format on his performances on the US circuit of yoga and meditation centers, a paradigm of militant sustainability and sense of community and network that runs independently and parallel to the more mainstream, washed out and wealthy New Age business model. In recent years he has come to collaborate with a new generation of musicians, from Blues Control to Sun Araw, and in 2013 the All Saints label run by Brian Eno released the ‘Celestial Music 1978-2011’ compilation, and re-issued the albums ‘Essence/Universe’ (1987), ‘Flow Goes The Universe’ (1992) and ‘The Way Out Is The Way In’ (1995), these last two coupled together as ‘Two Sides To Laraaji’.

To OUT.FEST Laraaji comes to present ‘The Peace Garden’, for which he invites each public member to connect with his inner Peace Garden in an integrated workshop/performance environment that combines yoga exercises and deep listening. Laraaji’s proposal to his temporary pupils is to guide them on a journey of call-response chanting, exploratory language, gentle stretching and laughter breathing postures towards the sound meditation posture known as Savasana. The session culminates with an extended immersive music performance, where electronic zither, mbire, gong, chimes and vocals combine to transport the attending group of individuals on an inner journey to places of deep release, rest and harmonisation.