For Immediate Release:
Biblical Digital
Produced by Joshua Sitron with ccbrown, Rob Filomena & Patrick Krouchian
“From epic, dramatic, thunderous and sweeping like a film score to intimate, visceral, well-directed plaintive lines, this electronic album encompasses a full spectrum of light and dark, of mind and emotion, simply rotating around creativity and musical voice rather than any particular genre indications…With care, the album is described by the artist as, “If Moby’s “Play” were entitled ‘Cry.”…. We get about 75 new albums a DAY coming in here now, (about 30,000 total), and Biblical Digital is one of the best we’ve ever heard.” -CD BABY
What do Sioux POW wows, Hasidic niggunim, Tuvan overtone singing have in common? They are all cries for life. They all cry spirit. In Biblical Digital, they are liberated from their cultural and religious moorings, and presented over dark, minimalist arrangements; at times fiery, at times ambient and hypnotic.
Biblical Digital is Josh’s first serious work outside of the realm of children’s music and comedy. It expresses the darker and more intense sides of his experience including struggles with depression, and a dramatic spiritual awakening punctuated by serious study in many holistic fields including yoga, Reiki, kung fu, feng shui, gardening, among others. He writes:
“Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of what I call my awakening. It’s when cracks in my mask of depression began to appear. And the still and silent voice in my gut spoke up and said: ‘I’m here. It’s time, you might want to look into Yoga.’ What followed can only be described as the permanent opening of a door of perception which was marked by constant change of relationships, career paths, endings, beginnings, miracles of synchronicity and profound experience-highlighted by shamanic journeys to Egypt and Peru. While Biblical Digital is a very real and personal expression of my own journey, and this path can be seen mirrored on a macrocosmic level, in the shake-ups, and unfolding, of what I sincerely believe is the spiritualization of mankind. We are deep into the process. I hope that those out there who can identify will be touched and moved in someway by this music. I give it freely, and acknowledge the divinity in all of you.”
>track by track (musical metaphysical musings)
1-Morning
The album begins with an awakening. Minimal, repetitive, classic guitar strokes approximate the feeling of first light hitting your eyes as you make the mysterious transition from one world to another-from that of the astral dream world-to our waking reality dream world. Conscious creeps in, grogginess is shaken off, and there is confusion, maybe even fear of the unknown to come.
The guitars have been layered, and cut and pasted on the computer, to give an eerie techno quality of exact repetition, to an otherwise organic and analog sound.
2-Disneyland
This one will raise consciousness. Picture yourself within 2 pyramids of energy, which completely surrounds your body–one facing up, and one down, so that a 3-dimensional star of David surrounds you extending a foot above and below you. This is your merkaba-your light body, your ascension vehicle. It’s why you literally are a star. Now the music begins and a keyboard beats its wings, This time it’s the bell like tones of a Fender Rhodes that trace out the sacred geometric chord progression. And your 2 pyramids begin to spin; each in the opposite direction. Faster and faster, heat is created. A wind begins to blow, and they begin to glow. Greater and greater energy is created. Breathe. Deeper and deeper. By the time the searing cry of a Sioux pow pow explodes overhead, you have ascended. Your energetic body has been lifted into an overtone of higher consciousness. The 4th dimension? Ride the terrible and glorious waves of sound to heaven. You are a new initiate to these mysteries, so after 30-seconds or so in flight, you must rest. Return to the temporal. The chant gallops away into the clouds. The music mellows to a recovery waltz. But it will never leave your consciousness again and a lone trombone played on windy hilltop honors its remembrance.
Ironically, the chant sample was taken from a children’s pow wow by the Black Lodge singers entitled “Mickey Mouse”. Listen closer. The chant goes: “Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, they all work at Disneyland, Disneyland, Disneyland”. Re-imagined in the context of Biblical Digital, I am crying in anger against the spiritually –bereft, corporate theft that I witnessed and was a part of, while writing children’s music for Nickelodeon and Disney. This exasperation was the initial impetus for the track. Clark Gayton (world class session musician who has played with Sting and Prince among others) plays trombone. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album, and it is truly and originally me, for better or worse.
3-One of These Days
Like Disneyland, One of these Days is a flash point song. Energy is generated and momentum builds up until a point of transcendence and transformation is reached and we break through the clouds. This one imagines a camp fire pow wow storytelling session. Maybe with peace pipe being passed around. When critical mass is achieved, we break on through to the other side, and find ourselves in a mirrored discotheque- intergalactic shaman-style.
4-Brothers
Its creation was in inspired by a quote from an Israeli general in the New York Times: “So where am I going to go, back to Bergen-Beelines where my mother came from?” the general asked. “No. So we are going to stick around. Either they join us or they lose.” It just seemed to embody the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict to me-expressing deep determination and will, while belying the desperate, and even hopeless, intractability of the situation. .
The sample is from Bienvenida ‘Berta’ Aguado’s and Loretta ‘Dora’ Gerassi’s a Cappella performance of “La Vuelta Del Marido” off of Chants judéo-espagnoles on the French Inedit label. The music is sung in Ladino, which is the ancient language of Sephardic Jews (those from Mediterranean regions including Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, etc). It’s a combination of Hebrew and Spanish, much like the language of northern European or Ashkenazi Jews (Russia, Poland, Germany, etc.) is Yiddish.
A slow motion helicopter landing begins the track, and there is a ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’ vibe here. I learned quite by chance long after I chose the sample, that the chant I remixed (details below) is translated as: “On a white horse he comes, with a sword in his right hand….”
5-7/8
This track began with I process I stumbled across in the studio, I call the delay game. A delay loop about 3.5 seconds long is set up to repeat infinitely. For each 3.5-second pass of the loop, a new layer is recorded in real time. In few minutes, the loop might have hundreds of layers on it producing a wildly dense multitude of activity. For 7/8, my delay game loop features a blowing shofar (ancient Israeli instrument made from a ram’s horn) and much percussion in a 7/8 meter or time signature. I later overdubbed rich violins in a simple yet powerful, descending progression. I then gave it to my friend cc brown, and he added wonderfully lush b and c-sections to the track, where things turn brighter and then slower.
6-Tuvan
I had learned about Tuvan (Central Mongolian) throat singing in the documentary “Wild Man Blues”. It features an ancient and sacred type of chanting where the singer adjusts the shape of his throat and intones various vowel sounds to create an effect which is truly like nothing on earth.
The sacred science of sound metaphysics is quite profound on this subject. Simply put (certainly, over simply): Everything is energy-waves-sounds. At the heart of Einstein’s theory is the truth that energy and matter are the really the same thing. Our perception of them just depends on our relative viewpoint. So, what we think of as being our hard, and solid physical bodies, is really an exquisite symphony of vibrating, constantly moving and changing, energy, sound, and music.
The seven chakras (energy centers) relate to the 7 notes of the scale.
Our voice is the conductor. The fundamental of any pitch uttered or sung relates to what we perceive as physical or “real”. They resonant at lower frequencies more in the middle of our hearing range. The harmonics of a pitch relate to the “spiritual”. The harmonics are imperceptible “tuning fork whistles” which sit atop the sound in frequencies at the upper edge and beyond our hearing range. This is illustrated by the fact that the harmonics are barely perceived when hearing sound. It is mostly the fundamental that is heard. But both always exist. Without harmonics, sound is flat, characterless. They are literally the soul of the sound, and by increasing our ability to hear and be aware of sound harmonics, we can become aware of the spirit and the soul.
In Tuvan throat singing, the harmonics become amplified to quite audible levels. Hark the angels sing….
7-Lamaragga
Another sacred chant tradition, that creates shimmering harmonics when sung, is that of the Tibetan Buddhist monks. While the fundamental pitches of the chanting monks are very low, there can be heard a subtle overtone harmonic many octaves above. In lamaragga, the monks chants in a fast repetitive rhythmic “ohm a mane padme hung” which induces meditative states. Talented remixer Patrick Krouchian led the way with this techno-house remix.
8-Carlebach
Fed up with Nickelodeon and the NY grind, I took a 6-week trip to Israel with my friend and filmmaker, Ryan Lifchitz. For the first couple of weeks of the trip, we were on a program called ‘Isralight’. I was exposed to more orthodox aspects of Judaism than those of my reform upbringing. One, which intrigued me, was the concept of the niggun. The niggun is a wordless, a cappella chant, sung at all religious ceremonies and after meals. It would start with a post meal tapping on the table (I believe the vibrations of the singing aided in digestion), and then build until a group of men would be dancing in a circle furiously intoning ‘nye-nye-nye’ or ‘dye-dye-dye’ in whatever niggun melody was chosen. I found that participating in nigguns was electrifyingly uplifting. More than once I felt as though they had the same spirit and character as a Native American fireside pow wow. Interestingly, watching and not participating in a niggun, I found to be tedious. Alas, this was the lot of all women in Jewish orthodoxy.
Very traditional and ashkenazi in character, nigguns have been codified in recent decades by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the foremost niggun composer and performer whose chants sound like they might have come straight out of an 18th century Polish ghetto. It is a live performance of Shlomo Carlebach’s “Od Yishoma”, a wedding niggun, that I remixed on Biblical Digital.
After our 2 weeks in the heart of Jerusalem’ s old city, Ryan and I traveled to Tel Aviv; a large, modern, seaside city. I was thankful to have a break from the rigid religious observances. However, my relief turned to shock, when I witnessed the heart of ‘secular’ Israel. It was as if I had emerged to quickly from ocean depths and got the bends. It was as different and as opposite from my Jerusalem as I could imagine. White, American-born males, wearing black and sporting long beards that were very willing to persuade me into religious practice, were replaced by scantily clad dark-skinned Israeli-born youths that completely ignored you and were often quite unfriendly. There was a massive rave and ecstasy culture among them.
It seemed to me that both poles of Israel, the secular and the religious, though in conflict and separation, were searching for the same spiritual sustenance and transcendence. The energy and the spirit of the orthodox niggun and the trance rave club were nearly identical to me. What’s more, one was voice only, the other was almost only instrumental.
In my track, “Carlebach” I’ve united the two in a messianic marriage ceremony where opposites reconcile and party down. But in the end, the echoes of Judaic suffering (in the form of Carlo Nicolau’s violin mournful violin cadenza) appear once more before fading away; like a train heading east.
9-Romeo
Inspired by a quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune, which reads, “Fear is the mind killer. I must not fear”. The plaintive banjo is usurped by a heavyhearted orchestral dirge from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. It is the dense march of fear looking to hold sway.
10-Sephardic
Also built around an a cappella ladino chant performed by Bienvenida ‘Berta’ Aguado and Loretta ‘Dora’ , “Sephardic” was co-produced by Rob Filomena and mixed by Juan Sosa.
11-Pavane
The heartbreaking piano sequence from Ravel’s Funeral for a Princess is accompanied by decidedly digital percussion and bass, only to be swept away by a sea of white noise-which is the sound of water, wind, or static. Just as the color white contains every color in the spectrum, white noise contains every pitch frequency in the spectrum. It is the aural equivalent of white light. It’s what we hear when moving we’re born, and when we die.
Listen: Put your hands on your cheeks, and then very slowly and with great pressure move them back over your ears to simulate the friction created when your head moved through the birth canal. This is what you heard when you were born.
12-charlene
Based on a theme I wrote for a short film called “Tropical Charlene”. The sad waltz of a piano provides the soundtrack to a forlorn woman, about to leave her man.
13-arabian
The “Arabian Dance” theme from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is re-imagined as a trip hop tune. Clark Gayton blows trombone, and Patrick Krouchian co-produced and mixed.
14-lalalala
A cosmic download of light, joy and hope break through the clouds and descend to earth. Everything’s going to be ok after all.
15-healing song
Primeaux and Mike’s “Healing Song” from the Canyon Records is remixed and given wings by an buoyant duo of strumming acoustic guitars, later joined by bass, drums, and an electric solo. Behold the new initiate being greeted by applause. The cycle of remembrance and purification is ended. What is next? We shall see.
>credits
All tracks composed, performed, and mixed by Joshua Sitron except:
Tracks 5,6 co-produced by cc brown
Tracks 7,13 co-produced by Patrick Krouchian
Track 10 co-produced by Rob Filomena
Vocal on track 6 – Kenneth Dale
Trombone on tracks 2,13 – Clark Gayton
Violin on track 8 – Carlo Nicolau
Tracks mixed by:
4 – Luis Felipe Herra Tlatoa,
5,6 – CC Brown
7,13 – Krou
8,10,11,15 – Juan Sosa
Mastered by Kurt Upper
Cover Photo by Lisa Creagh www.lisacreagh.com
CD design by Steve Swingler www.steveswingler.com
Special Thanks to Carlo Nicolau and everyone at Razorhead Music, Olga Toporovsky, Alan, Nina, Andy, Ron Baker, Ronen Glimer, Ryan Liftchitz, Edmund Friedman, Lisa Creagh, Steve Swingler, Centralia, and God.
All songs published by:
Biblical Digital (ASCAP)
290 N.7th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 963-1014
>contact
Hear and buy the album at:
www.CDbaby.com/sitron3
Contact the artist:
Joshua Sitron
290 N.7th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 963-1014
www.joshuasitron.com
