Laurie Anderson’s record label has posted a track “Listen Without Distraction” from her upcoming album release Songs From The Bardo on Smithsonian Folkways done in collaboration with Tenzin Choegyal and Jesse Paris Smith. The first track is a series of quotations from the “Great Liberation Through Hearing” from the Bardo Thodol known in English speaking countries as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The label’s description says:
“Songs from the Bardo begins with a bell ringing out once, twice, three times, as a ritualistic chant emerges from the dense silence. The collaborative composition by avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson, Tibetan multi-instrumentalist Tenzin Choegyal, and composer and activist Jesse Paris Smith is a guided journey through the visionary text of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, unfolding in an 80-minute ebb and flow of sound and words. Songs from the Bardo is a transporting experience, meant to draw the listener into the present moment and provide a framework for inner exploration. Anderson, Choegyal, and Smith fuse modern compositional techniques with the mystique of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to make these visionary traditions more accessible to a new generation of listeners and to reveal the ancient wisdoms contained within.
You can order a copy here:
https://folkways.si.edu/songs-from-the-bardo
And listen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3IUgPvIupc&feature=youtu.be.
