Bodhi Giants

The concept of light has boggled the minds of humans for thousands of years. We have tried to describe it, bend it, twist it, tube it, generate it, and some humans are continually trying to find ways to travel as fast as it does. Light is a symbol of life and well being, without vision it could be assumed that nothing exists. Hearing also offers proof, or perhaps just enough vague evidence to allow us to explore invisible worlds. The idea of going to new places, experiencing a new culture, and embarking on unique journeys is a beautiful part of being alive.

Howard Givens, owner and founding partner of Spotted Peccary Music, and fellow musician Craig Padilla, for many years have been operating at the confluence of technology and hearing, the integration of compassion and energy, and the purification of body, mind and wisdom using electronic music.

The Bodhi Mantra is their latest collaboration, previous titles include Being Of Light, Life Flows Water, and Spirit Holy Rising. Givens has been involved as Producer as well as performing the Mixing and serving as Recording Engineer for hundreds of projects, including mastering such Padilla titles as The Heart of the Soul, Below the Mountain, The Light of the Shadow, Genesis, and Vostok.

As we listen to these celestial sounds, we may be tempted to imagine pieces of evidence that there were giants on Earth a long, long time ago. Where did they come from and what practical importance is there now of them today? Music offers illusion as well as confidence. Mantras come in many forms, a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times. Some of our best evidence exists because someone long ago used their time to carve mantras into rocks as a form of meditation. Mantras are a religious thought, a prayer, a sacred utterance, but are also sometimes believed to be a spell or tool of supernatural power. If there is one consistency in life, then it is the one of change. The recording studio has brought the carving of mantras into heretofore unimaginable places.

Listeners to music do it to satisfy their love of mystery, and to make themselves comfortable, music creates a pleasing experience, and affects our health positively.

I have learned from my many years of exploring the audio arts that it is too easy to proclaim that “This is the greatest thing I have ever heard in my life!” The words become meaningless the second time they are invoked, and further such exclamations of epiphematic miracles tend to lessen the intended effect. But heck, there is a whole lot of great music out there! What best makes this message real every time? Perhaps metaphor is an answer.

Water is an important source of life on Earth and about 71 percent of the surface of the Earth is water. A river can be portrayed by many as an everlasting symbol of perpetual and continual change and of the constancy of time and of life itself.

For many years people have wanted to find the gold in the river, or perhaps they seek a way of turning all kinds of substances into gold and thus become rich without much effort. Here they are, the secrets of alchemy, and that begets the question of what is gold and what is illusion. Gold might be love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and gentleness, and the only way to demonstrate that one is truly finding gold is to produce miraculous and supernatural fruit, to demonstrate an ability to be filled with the Holy Spirit. What does it mean to be filled with the Spirit? I know only that I cannot define the ecstatic experience. No one can, but still we love to try anyway. Being filled with the Spirit results in an abundant and overflowing life. That might be all the proof needed.

Let us receive immeasurable auspiciousness, brilliance, magnificence, and ease, let us use our imaginations to explore possibilities of time travel and the concept of creation of bodies periodically through time. The individual experience of time and how each listener experiences time is very different. There are multiple perspectives of time that one must consider when questioning time travel. Behold the sound engineer, she or he investigates hoaxes, legends, obscure accounts, and the academic excavations of giant bones, skulls and skeletons found globally going back thousands of years.

Now think about the future and what might be found here.

I had the opportunity to talk about giant's bones with Givens and Padilla, but we never used those specific words. We used email and were in different times and places, yet here is our short conversation for you to view right now.

ROBIN JAMES What is the story of your work together and creating your newest album?

CRAIG PADILLA Howard and I continue to grow as a musical duo every time we create music, both solo and as a duo. This new album evolved from our personal journey of music, which is based on our appreciation of the way we have been experiencing the perception of consciousness. This is The Bodhi Mantra. Bodhi is a Sanskrit name translated as "enlightenment" or "awakening" which relates to a Buddhist concept, wherein Bodhi is synonymous with the state of nirvana, being freed from hate, greed and ego. We represented this idea in the music by making it sound warm and peaceful; hypnotic and uplifting.

HOWARD GIVENS The work that Craig and I have been collectively exploring, thematically parallels an abstract journey within a sound/music experience… texture, expanse, mood, contemplation, movement, energy, etc., and the self-awareness, realization, and observation of a more expansive appreciation of our existence, usually expressed the abstract experience one has through meditation and yoga.

RJ What is your role as a composer?

CP My task as a composer is to make a musical story that I would want to hear and feel, and have that energy pass along to the listener.

HG There’s a powerful experience that comes from the synergy of working together especially when those moments of an unspoken, mutual tapping into a stream-of-consciousness flow happens. That’s when the magic really happens, at least from my perspective. I believe that this whole “conversation” of music is complete when the listener then becomes involved, creating their own vision, their own experience with the music. So ultimately it’s the goal of my work, with audio, composition, visual art, etc. and the goal of Spotted Peccary Music, to create and present as transparent an expression the art forms as possible, hopefully inviting a deepening space for the listener to participate in.

RJ The Bodhi Mantra is music to meditate to, what is listening?

HG So the music isn’t really a soundtrack for doing meditation or yoga, but rather an artistic expression OF the process of meditation or yoga. Because we are delving into the sense behind the music, we are trying to create a suggestion of the feeling of these practices. The title of our newest release therefore relates to the inspiration for the music, for the experience.

CP "Listening" is both a proactive and a subconscious act of being in tune with sonic vibrations emanating around and within us.

HG The sounds we choose, whether electronic or acoustic in nature, has more to do with the space created by their use, and how we resonate with the sonic experience in the moment of creation much like sound and ceremony have helped shift people’s state of awareness throughout human history.

RJ What is music?

HG For us, the abstract language of music allows us to communicate the nature of our life experience without relying entirely on the use of adjectives to try to define such a subtle sense that often times can’t be adequately described with words (outside of poetry) or pictures, much like how a photograph does not convey the feeling of being present in a particular place.

CP Music is the language of the Universe. It can be created with nature, and with man-made instruments. It can speak to the soul. It can tell a story. And all music is a part of history that gets preserved once it's recorded. Music is vibrations of frequencies which stimulate the senses in all living things.

RJ When did you first come upon Spotted Peccary Music? What attracted you?

CP When I created Vostok in 2001, I had no intention of releasing it because I was making upbeat music at the time. However, I had sent a copy of it to a music reviewer who really enjoyed it, and he suggested that I send it to Spotted Peccary Music. I was not familiar with the label at the time, but I thought I'd reach out to them. Once they heard Vostok, they were interested in releasing it, as well as future albums. I was also attracted by the positive and creative energy from Howard Givens and Deborah Martin, and by the high quality of music that was (and still is) being released on their label. I feel honored to be included on their roster.

HG In the mid-to-late 1970’s, my closest friends and I were always looking for more music to listen to that described the space that related to our philosophical / spiritual explorations that we were all delving into at the time. This led us to recordings by Pink Floyd, Yes, Starcastle, Paul Horn, Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schultze, Tomita, and early Kitaro, early Styx, Brian Eno... anything that would suggest the spacier, more textural side of any of this music, and oftentimes very electronic in nature. Later of course, this expanded to include more experimental music, David Sylvian, Steve Roach and music that finally was really defining a genre becoming known as ambient, perhaps more than New Age, which was moving away from textural and into more instrumental and melodic. And as we developed our own sonic expression in the early 1980’s with guitar, flute, effects, and then added synthesizers, we started to cultivate a sound while creating a sort of abstract “soundtrack” that was completely inspired by our experiences in the Sonoran Desert around Tucson, Arizona.

RJ What listening events changed your life as you were developing your ears?

CP I've been playing guitar all of my life. The moment I had first heard Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene album in a local planetarium during a high school field trip, I decided that I wanted to make music like that.

RJ How about Brain Laughter and the fit with Spotted Peccary Music?

HG I have been directly or indirectly involved with many of the releases on Spotted Peccary throughout the years, with more of a focus on mastering in the more recent years. As such, I have to squeeze my own projects in between our different releases as well as mastering work for Steve Roach, who I work with “outside” of the Spotted Peccary catalog. So most of the time, sound development continues but compositional time has suffered.

Realizing that a label is stronger in its presentation to the industry and to listeners if it has several artists, we invited other artists who had like-interests to create music for the label.

So from that point on, the label grew and evolved, adding artists and releases, and even changing its principal ownership and staff to what it is today. But the original concept of a label owned and operated by artists on the label is still true and fundamental to the heart of Spotted Peccary Music, as is a dedication to producing the highest quality sound, visual presentation and artistic expression possible.

Drawing on all our spiritual interests as well as including the stories from Carlos Castaneda and his writings of shamanic experiences in the Sonoran Desert, our musical explorations were heavily influenced by all the energy of that powerful region, totally impacting these earliest collaborations that evolved into the “group" effort Brain Laughter and ultimately led to our first full release, In The Land Of Power.

As we learned more of what we would need to do to share our work and vision of this music, we created Spotted Peccary Music as our own label to support our work.

RJ What is next?

HG Lately I have been making a push towards completing some solo works, but I do often prefer the energy around collaboration, like the releases with Craig Padilla and with Madhavi Devi, which interestingly was where I started - with the energy behind the Brain Laughter projects.

RJ Thank you both for your time and for the amazing listening experiences you create!