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Jai Uttal was on the bleeding edge of the chant curve. He started singing kirtan in the 1980s and has been incorporating it into his music to such a degree that it's now his primary musical vehicle. And in a way, that's a shame. Uttal is possessed of a warm, slightly weathered, and impassioned voice that he wraps around serpentine melodies. But because of that, we don't get to hear much of his instrumental side. That's partly remedied on this CD, which is something of a follow-up to Music for Yoga and Other Joys. Taking what was originally a backing track for an instructional meditation CD, Uttal has, with one tragic exception, stripped away the speaking voice, and reconfigured the music into a meditation in sound.
There's plenty of Uttal's chanting, but it's all wrapped in the swirling electronic ambiences and slow-trance grooves of Ben Leinbach, the bansuri flute of Manose, and Daniel Paul's tablas. Instead of chanting Uttal weaves seductive Robert Fripp-like e-bow guitar lines and dotar improvisations. Tracks like "Bija Mantras" and "Radiance" are as epic as a meditative song can get, although the effect is ruined at the end of "Radiance" by a spoken-word segment that's strictly for the converted. Except for that, Loveland: Music for Dreaming and Awakening is a definitive deep-space meditation CD.
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